


The Spare Bedroom

by AequitasInfinitas



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Flashbacks, Post-Reichenbach, Romance, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Suspense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-20 22:26:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 37,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1527905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AequitasInfinitas/pseuds/AequitasInfinitas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had always served as the perfect analogy for her situation and had she been more poetically inclined, she would have been amused by how well it described everything. She could never make space in that room for anything other than him, anymore than she could make space in her heart for anyone else but him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The End of the Beginning

**"Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present amongst us because we won't let go of them."**

― T.H White,  _The Once and Future King._

**"He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock."**

― Sue Grafton,  _M is for Malice._

* * *

Removing her key from the slightly stiff brass lock, she pushed against the heavy oak door and entered the peaceful refuge that was her apartment. Her legs ached from yet another day of standing around at the morgue and she practically yearned for a nice, hot shower and the chance to change into her soft and comfortable pajamas.

Depositing her keys and handbag on the glass side-table next to the doorway, Molly removed her shoes and jacket, placing them at their designated position by the door and made her way into her living room. She needed a few moments to catch her breath and let the madness of the rush-hour in the tube dissipate. Her cream colored couch practically called out to her and she spared a few moments to unwind on its comfortable surface. Looking around at her welcoming apartment she noted that the beautiful white roses adorning her window ledges had almost wilted. She would have to replace them some time tomorrow before going to work.

Eventually she forced herself from the comfort of her couch and moved past the entrance, towards her bedroom. On her way, she passed the open doorway into the spare bedroom, which she had slowly but surely started to convert into her own little library. Perhaps one day, into the distant future, she would forgo all pretenses and simply remove the queen sized bed and its twin side-tables, currently occupying space. She would often wonder why she hadn't done it yet. Deep down she knew that she, herself, had given up on the idea of ever needing a spare bedroom in her life a long time ago. She supposed she was keeping up pretenses mostly for her mother's sake. Mrs Hooper was adamantly refusing to acknowledge the possibility that her daughter might never need a spare bedroom in her life.

Molly knew that most women in her place would lose sleep over the matter, watching the minutes pass by as if they were years and despairing at the hopelessness of it all. But Molly was not one of those women, nor was she so career oriented that she could claim to simply not have the time and energy for a relationship and all it's complications. No, Molly would have had no objection of being in a relationship nor did she object to the concept of starting her own family. She had more than enough time in her life for all of it. It wasn't even a question of being unable to find someone. She had met plenty of nice, respectable men in her life and she had even gone out on a few dates with them. Then gradually she would notice these little things here and there that would put an end to it all. She would notice that their eyes were the wrong shade of blue, or that their voices lacked that deep smooth pitch or that their hair was either too dark or too fair, never the right tinge of chocolate brown. She would notice how easily they smiled or how transparent their thoughts were to her. Molly would notice these things and she would smile politely and excuse herself, before leaving and never looking back.

And so she knew that she had no right to complain about her situation, it was entirely of her own doing and she was content with it. She had never resented  _him_ either, it was not his fault that she felt what she felt. In all honesty, Molly was satisfied with her life. Her work was both interesting and fulfilling, she was more than comfortable monetary wise and she had the time and means to put herself first. If she wanted a particularly expensive piece of jewelry she could acquire it, if she wanted to continue filling her spare bedroom with shelves upon shelves of beautiful leather bound volumes she could do it. She had her cat Toby with his dark fur and intelligent green eyes, who was always happy to see her when she returned home and she had a small group of close acquaintances with whom she could socialize with when she chose to.

Molly slipped out of her work clothes, picking up the now rumpled pile and placing it in the nearby laundry basket. One of the main reasons she had persisted in acquiring this particular apartment was the spacious en-suite bathroom that came along with the master bedroom. Turning on the faucets, she allowed for a few seconds to pass, giving the water the chance to warm up to the temperature she desired and then she stepped into the inviting water, letting it cascade down her body. If there was one thing she would readily admit to, it was that she was always one for long showers. It had been a point of fond irritation with her family when she was growing up.  _Molly, if you stay in there any longer you'll grow fish scales,_ her father would always tease her affectionately.

Letting the warm water soothe her exhaustion, she finished her shower and stepped out into the coolness of her bedroom. Her sky blue silk sheets beckoned her and she almost gave in but she knew that it would be better if she got something light to eat before going to bed and of course there was also Toby to take care of. A simple meal of warm vegetable soup, apple slices and toast and she was more than ready to turn in for the night. Making her final rounds along her apartment, she checked that the windows were sealed, the balcony door locked and her doorway locked and bolted. Central London was a dangerous place and she had no intention, whatsoever, of becoming another crime statistic. The cool silk felt like heaven against her skin and before long she could feel herself drifting off to peaceful slumber.

Her dreams were strange, she was surrounded by darkness but she was not afraid. Rather, she was irritated. She was irritated at the constant noise preventing her from her much needed rest. No matter which way she turned, her dream of the constant sound of something banging against wood was all she could hear. Molly opened her eyes, gradually realizing that she was not dreaming and that there was in fact something or rather someone banging on her door in the middle of the night. She could feel herself starting to panic. She rarely had visitors and certainly not at this time of night. Whatever was happening she was sure it was nothing good. Her first instinct was to grab the phone on her nightstand and call the police. The more her sleep riddled mind cleared, the more she considered the situation. Her building boasted a twenty four hour security service, it wasn't like anyone could just walk in from the street and come into the building, let alone reach the seventh floor where she was residing. Dark thoughts started to cloud her mind. What if the intruder had incapacitated the security guard and simply strolled in? But if that were the case why would they be knocking on her door, why not just try to break it down instead? Molly closed her eyes letting her hearing take over. The knocking was constant and persistent but not violent. Whoever was on the other side was most definitely not trying to break down her door.

Molly gathered all the resolve she could muster and reached in her bedside drawer. She gripped the small pocket knife her father had given her all those years ago during a camping trip and she forced herself out of the illusion of safety that her bed had provided. She might not have any experience with this sort of thing but if there was one thing that Molly Hooper was, it was a survivor. She would approach the door and see who it could possibly be, but she would be smart about it.

Slowly walking towards the darkened doorway, she was grateful for her fluffy purple socks and the way they muffled her footsteps against the shiny hardwood floor. Molly gently reached the door, placing a silent hand against its frame and slowly moved to see who it was through the small peephole. Before she even had a chance to check who the intruder was, she heard it.

"Molly."

Molly dropped her small yet effective weapon and rapidly started to unbolt all the locks and chains keeping her door shut. Never in her life had she moved as fast or as efficiently as those few seconds it took her to unlock her door and rip it open. The dim light of the hallway was at his back, illuminating his looming silhouette and keeping his face in shadow. But Molly didn't have to see his face to know who it was that was standing at her doorway. She quickly stood aside, leaving the doorway free for his entrance. She watched him brush past her and into her flat, before closing the door and following him into the relative darkness of the living room. She had never liked closing her shutters at night, as they blocked the soft light of the moon that she so adored. Her living room was now partly filled with that luxurious soft silver light, allowing her to see him slumped back on her couch, almost in the identical position she had occupied a few hours prior.

She approached him, unsure of what she was supposed to do, but when she was finally close enough to see him clearly she realized that he was fast asleep. Molly allowed herself a few moments to really observe him and noted the exhaustion that was glaringly visible throughout his form. The only thing she was grateful for was the fact that he didn't appear to be wounded or hurt in any way. Silently she crept back into her bedroom, rummaging into her cupboard and locating the warmest and softest of her blankets. Clutching the material in shaky hands, she went back to her living room and ever so carefully draped it over his sleeping form. She had to admit the scene was slightly ridiculous, her soft lilac blanket smelling of her favorite jasmine detergent and the sleeping yet still somehow commanding form of the consulting Detective snuggled comfortably against her cream couch.

Reassuring herself that there was nothing more she could do for now, she allowed herself one last look in the direction of her living room and then returned to her bedroom, leaving her doorway open in case she was needed. Molly, closed her eyes and willed herself to go back to sleep. Her eyelids gradually begun to feel heavier and she felt the tell-tale signs of sleep enveloping her.

_It was absurd really, how fast she had scrambled to open the door. She had never gotten the chance to look through the peephole. She had heard her name being called. But it wasn't that. It wasn't her name being spoken. It was the voice saying it. She knew that voice with its deep smooth pitch just as she knew that the moment she opened the door the first thing she would see would be a pair of emerald-blue eyes, the same fathomless pair of eyes that haunted her for almost every day of her adult life. And there it was, the reason Molly Hooper would never need a spare bedroom in her life. Because as far as she was concerned the spare bedroom in her apartment was already occupied. It may not have been occupied with his tangible presence but it was nonetheless occupied. It had always served as the perfect analogy for her situation and had she been more poetically inclined she would have been amused by how well it described everything. She could never make space in that room for anything other than him, anymore than she could make space in her heart for anyone else but him._


	2. The Hopelessness of Hope

**"She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart."**

― John Dufresne,  _Love Warps the Mind a Little_ **  
**

**"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."**

— C.S Lewis,  _The Four Loves_

* * *

The sluggish rays of the morning sunshine slowly intruded the shaded comfort of her bedroom, making her open her eyes reluctantly. A look at her alarm clock confirmed that she had awoken twenty minutes ahead of schedule and for a few seconds she deliberated using those extra twenty minutes to lounge in the warmth of her bed. Finally, she resisted the temptation and forced herself to get up and prepare for the day. Showered, dressed and more alert than she had been an hour ago, she exited her bedroom, padding slowly across the hardwood floors so as to make as little noise as possible. She had seen the way he had looked last night. Even the word exhausted was not enough to describe the sheer fatigue she could see emanating from his very pores. Her suspicions were confirmed when she found him exactly where she had left him the previous night. Fast asleep, with her ridiculously girly blanket covering him and keeping him warm.

She inched past him quietly, thankful for the spaciousness of her apartment and the fact that the kitchen was situated at the other end of her living room, far away that she wouldn't disturb him as she bustled about making breakfast. First she made sure there was a steaming pot of coffee in the making and then she busied herself making something to eat. For herself she went with her usual cereal with chocolate and strawberry flakes, accompanied of course by a few slices of her favorite sweet apples. Washing down her breakfast with a glass of orange juice, she debated about what to do next. She could make some traditional bacon and eggs or she could warm up some pastries, perhaps some croissants with butter and cheese. She knew how he liked his coffee, how could she not? She had learned this particular piece of information the first time she had been foolish enough to hope for something more from him.  _Black two sugars_.  _I'll be upstairs ._  Those words still haunted her sometimes but now she knew enough to understand that they had not been spoken with the intention of hurting her. He simply had not understood what exactly it was that she was asking from him and Molly couldn't help but smile at the distant memory of that day.

The coffee was ready and she ensured it would stay hot in its container, before placing the box of sugar cubes, a spoon and a coffee mug right next to it. She decided she would cover all bases and occupied herself with cooking the bacon and eggs, before heating up three fairly large croissants with cheese and butter. There was fresh orange juice in her fridge, along with a three-quarter full carton of milk. All in all she hoped that there wouldn't be anything that he might want for. Placing the food in the oven, she wrote a quick note informing him where everything was and she exited the kitchen. She knew of course that her note was redundant, he would simply enter the kitchen, look around for a few seconds and know everything that there was to know.

She walked past the couch with steely determination, squashing the urge to reach out and brush his soft, chocolate brown locks away from his closed eyes. She was getting better at it and who knew, maybe one day she would be able to erase the burning longing that always gripped her in his presence entirely. That day could not come fast enough, though deep down she knew that it never would and so for now she buttoned up her jacket, picked up her handbag and prepared herself for yet another busy day at Saint Bart's.

* * *

Molly was quite proud of herself. She had spent most of her day entirely focused on her work, successfully suffocating any thoughts of him until her shift was at its end. She said her goodbyes to Mrs. Brown, the elderly receptionist who always had a kind word and a friendly smile for Molly and she hailed a taxi from the main road. She realized her mistake once she was seated on the slightly uncomfortable surface of the cab's seats. In the tube with all the chaos and cacophony she never had the time or the chance to retreat into her head and think. It was always about moving quickly, avoiding the crowds as much as possible and getting safely on and off. But right now, in the quiet backseat of the cab she had all the time in the world to ponder and obsess over what she had so successfully avoided thinking about all day.

The fact of the matter was that whether she avoided thinking about it or whether she sat there pondering it over and over in her mind, the situation was still the same. Sherlock Holmes was in her apartment right now, maybe still asleep on her couch or maybe sitting in one of her comfy armchairs and reading one of her much treasured books. It felt surreal to think of him in her apartment. Not because she thought he was dead like the rest of the world believed, after all Molly had been the one to help him fake his death. No, the reason she had such a hard time believing that any of it was real was the singular fact that she had thought of and dare she admit, even fantasized about this turn of events occurring again and again in all the long years that she had known him. How many late nights had she spent thinking about it? How many times had she fantasized about him turning up at her doorstep, maybe in need of her help? Sometimes she had thought about it so much that she had ended up dreaming of him knocking on her door and telling her he needed her. More often than not, she was embarrassed to recall, her dreams would take on a different undertone altogether as she invited him in and comforted him and gave him everything he wanted. Because sometimes what he wanted from her wasn't her help to solve a crime or to analyse a sample in the lab. In her dreams when he came to her apartment and told her he needed her, it was in a different kind of need than the one she was accustomed to in real life. It was embarrassing really, how in dreams she always gave in with no protests, her dream-self letting him do to her whatever he wanted. Molly liked to think or at least hope that her real life self would be more reserved and less willing to do anything and everything he told her. She had to believe it, not only for the sake of her pride and her womanly dignity, but also because she feared that she would go insane thinking about the things he did to her in her dreams in the context of her real life.

The ride to her flat had been too short for her liking but she supposed she couldn't put off the inevitable forever. Exiting the cab, she took out her keys and unlocked the imposing black and gold door to her apartment building. Entering the lobby she was ready to head for the elevator when she realized she still had not idea how he had managed to get into her building in the first place. Molly walked up to the reception desk, situated in the far end of the lobby, determined to shed some light into her many questions.

"Miss Hooper. Good to see you. Everything all right I hope?"

"Very well Ed. And yourself?"

Molly noted the grey hairs scattered throughout Ed's once black hair and she smiled fondly. He had been working security in this building for as long as Molly could remember. He had been here when she had moved in almost seven years ago and even though she knew he was considering retiring she honestly couldn't imagine anyone else in his place.

"Not too bad. Same old, same old. What can I do for you Miss Hooper?"

That had always been a trait of his that she had appreciated. He had never been one for idle chit chat and Molly was grateful for it.

"I was wondering if you saw someone out of place last night ?" She watched him carefully considering her question.

"No, can't think of anything of the sort."

"Nothing unusual? No one trying to get into the building?" Molly had been trying to keep her tone light and conversational but she could see worry starting to build up in the old porter's eyes and she hurried to explain herself. "I was just wondering, you hear so many things in the news. We can't be too careful." She attempted a casual smile and hoped she was convincing. She knew that she couldn't exactly explain to Ed that Sherlock Holmes, the supposedly dead consulting Detective, had broken into their building last night and she wanted to know how.

"Of course Miss Hooper. But don't you worry, this is one of the safest buildings in the area. No one comes in or out without me knowing." Ed gave her a reassuring smile and Molly wondered how quickly his confidence would dissipate the moment she told him that he was so very very wrong. Instead she said her good nights and entered the lift, pressing the button to the seventh floor with particular zealously.

The metallic ping announced she had arrived at her floor and Molly took a moment to compose herself, before exiting the lift and heading to her door. Swiftly unlocking the doorway, she pushed it open and entered her flat. The first thing she noted was how quiet it seemed and forgetting to remove her shoes and jacket she rapidly entered the living room finding it empty. Her lilac blanket lay discarded on the corner of the couch and Molly tried with all her inner resolve not to see herself in its position. Something which had served its purpose and was now discarded to the side once more.

She couldn't help but despise herself ever so slightly. What was she expecting, that she would come home and find him right where she left him, waiting for her? She was being absurd. He probably needed a safe place to stay for the night. That was it. She had told herself this morning as she was making him breakfast not to get used to this. It was a one time thing and he would probably be gone long before she got back from work. And yet a pathetically hopeful part of her really thought that he would at least wait and tell her goodbye before he left.

"Your cat despises me. You'll have to get rid of it." Molly jumped at the sound of his deep baritone voice, her left hand clutching at her heart wildly.

She was so busy mentally admonishing herself that she hadn't heard the slide of a door opening. Molly turned around and was greeted with the sight of a half-naked Sherlock casually strolling out of her spare bedroom as if he owned the place. It took her a while to collect her scattered thoughts before finally addressing him, all the while resolutely refusing to stare at the tiny water droplets making their way down the fair skin of his chest.

"I thought you'd left."

She saw him tilt his head slightly to the side and favor her with one of his piercing looks.

"Clearly."

Molly waited for him to elaborate, all the while trying not to flinch under his penetrating gaze. She didn't know what she would do if he brought up seeing her dejected look when she thought he had left without telling her. She knew her pride simply wouldn't be able to handle it. She watched him clasp his hands behind his back and step a few paces closer to her.

Molly had to remind herself to stay exactly where she was. She wouldn't run and she wouldn't let the fact that the only thing preventing him from being completely naked was one of her purple towels wrapped around his waist, deter her. She would concentrate and she would manage to have a coherent conversation with him if it was the last thing she did.

"I'm not getting rid of Toby." Toby had become almost like family to her and she was not going to get rid of him for whatever reason. Besides, she wasn't sure why it even mattered to him anyway. He would only have to tolerate Toby for a few more hours, long enough to get dressed and be on his way to wherever it was he was going to next.

Sherlock continued to advance on her until he was standing right in front her, invading her personal space, but she refused to let him intimidate her. Or rather, she refused to show him just how much his proximity unnerved her.

"Fine. But you'll keep him out of my room." With that he walked off, leaving her confused and slightly disorientated. By the time she had processed what he had said, he was already in  _his_ room. Molly felt herself collapse against the couch, wondering whether or not she was hallucinating this very moment. She was currently experiencing the worst case of cognitive dissonance that she ever had. On the one hand and for the sake of her emotional sanity, she hoped that she hadn't heard him right or that she had misunderstood his meaning. And on the other hand she couldn't remember wanting anything as much as in that moment she wanted it all to be real.


	3. The Perils of Symbiosis

**"My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."**

― Emily Bronte,  _Wuthering Heights_ **  
**

**"Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence."**

**―** Ovid

* * *

It had been four days. Four, bewildering days since the night he had so casually informed her that he was now living with her. She supposed a normal person in her position would demand an explanation, maybe ask what exactly it was that he was doing back in London and more specifically what he was doing in her apartment. But the term 'normal' had never really applied whenever Sherlock and herself were concerned and so she kept her silence.

In any case, if she was being honest with herself, she was much less concerned about his activities and projects and far more concerned about him, himself. The second night of their bizarre co-habitation, after she had finished preparing a dinner of roast chicken and potatoes in the oven, she found her eyes drifting to the couch. He was lounging comfortably against the cream material with her commandeered laptop securely in his hands. Molly hadn't realized that she was watching him so closely until she saw his fingers cease their rapid typing and still completely.

"Molly. What is it?" His tone was clipped with a hint of irritation and she knew that this was his way of warning her that he was not in the mood for whatever idle conversation it was that she had in mind.

"You're tired."

Molly could see from the way his green-blue eyes momentarily widened, that whatever it was that he had been expecting her to say, it was not that. For a few brief moments, Molly entertained the foolish idea that he might actually open up to her, maybe even talk to her about whatever was weighing him down. But all too soon, he resumed his frantic typing, once again disregarding her existence completely.

Her frustration with his stubborn attitude was not a novelty and she resigned herself to going on with her nightly routine and turning in early in the hope of attaining some much needed sleep. He was not one to be coddled, or one to share his thoughts and feelings. She could understand that, even respect it, but there was a small part of her that wanted to scream aloud in frustration. Not for the first time, she wondered how John had found the patience to deal with it. But alas, it was not like she could simply give John a call and ask him for tips to handle Sherlock. That was not an option and so with a defeated sign she left him to his work and retired to her bedroom.

Sleep eluded her for a good while and for the most part she lay wide awake staring into the darkness of her quiet room. The concept of time was slowly fading and at some point she felt herself reaching the precipice to sleep. The soft sliding of her bedroom door startled her. She kept her eyes closed, lying as still as she could. A few moments passed in absolute silence, before she felt the left side of her bed dip slightly under an unfamiliar weight. She was tempted to open her eyes, even for just a second, in order to confirm what she knew must be happening. Because of course, there was only one possible explanation, however improbable and bewildering it might be. But she didn't. Molly Hooper kept her eyes closed and willed herself to sleep. It was not until much, much later that she realized that he had never left her side during the remainder of the night.

* * *

They continued in this peculiar nightly ritual for six whole days. During the daytime everything would run as usual, she would go to work, get on with her routine and he would occupy himself with whatever it was that he was working on at the time. Then in the evening, she would prepare dinner, usually eating alone as he was too focused on his work to simply stop for sustenance, and then she would go about her normal nightly routine. Honestly, if it wasn't for the fact that she always stayed awake until he came into her room, she would have thought that she was dreaming the whole thing up. But Molly knew it was not a dream. His warm presence on her bed proved it and although he would never slip under the covers nor be there when she awoke in the morning, she still felt him at her side every night.

The morning after that first night, she had thought about bringing it up subtly, but the moment she stood to confront him his icy gaze froze her in the spot, almost daring her to try and bring it up. Molly knew a lost cause when she saw it and so once again she resorted to her usual way of dealing with it all and kept her silence as to the whole matter.

She bitterly wished that she could claim that his sudden appearance in her life had barely fazed her. And although, over the years she had gotten better at lying, she was still hopelessly incapable of lying convincingly to herself. She was distracted and it was starting to show. Thankfully her work hadn't suffered yet, but what little she could boast of a social life was in shambles. She found herself constantly making excuses to invitations for coffee or dinner and she hadn't properly spoken to any of her close acquaintances in some time. In ten days, if she was being precise.

Her excuses were gradually becoming less and less plausible and she was soon forced to admit that she had in fact no good reason to neglect her social life in this manner. It wasn't like living with him took up an awful lot of her time. He might be sharing an apartment with her physically, but mentally and emotionally he was entirely submerged in his own isolated world. A place she could not reach and a place she was not welcome.

"I'm sorry. I didn't see you. I'm so sorry."

Molly was startled out of her reverie, only to find that someone had accidentally collided with her. A quick look around reminded her that she was supposed to be shopping for groceries, not wandering the supermarket aisles aimlessly lost in thought. Fortunately, the stranger who had collided with her hadn't done so with much force. At least she was still standing.

"No, no. It was my fault. I was rather lost in thought. I'm sorry." Thankfully, she remembered her manners just in time and even tried to smile reassuringly at the apologetic stranger.

"I suppose we were both in our own worlds. Good thing I didn't make you drop anything."

Molly looked up at the friendly stranger, seeing his sheepish smile and his kind dark blue eyes.

"Really, it's fine. No harm done." She returned his hesitant smile and got ready to move past him and into the dairy aisle. Just yesterday she had discovered that there was a particular brand of chocolate milk Sherlock adored, no matter how adamantly he refused to admit so and she wanted to stock up on it.

"I'm Tom by the way. Tom Wright." Belatedly, Molly realized that apparently the conversation had not ended like she had assumed and hurried to cover up her mistake by briefly clasping his outstretched hand.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Molly Hooper."

"It's great to meet you too. Do you live around here?"

"No, it's work. I mean, my work is just down the corner."

"Same here. Well mine's just opposite actually. Do you see it? The building with all the dark glass?"

Molly, spared a quick glance at the store's window, smiling politely when she saw the building he was referring to.

"It looks very modern."

"It is. Just been around for two years. Newly redone and everything." Tom smiled at her again and Molly struggled to find a way to politely end the conversation for good this time without appearing rude.

"Uhmm. I have to dash. Lots of things to get done. It was nice meeting you." She offered him a small, somewhat awkward smile and moved past him.

"You too Molly. Maybe I'll see you around."

* * *

By the time she had finished with the copious amounts of grocery shopping she had left, the hour had gone well past seven. Taking a taxi home, she juggled the numerous grocery bags and valiantly attempted to unlock her front door.

A few agonizing moments later, she had entered the sanctuary of her beautiful apartment and let the heavy load of grocery bags slip from her aching hands. Taking a deep breath, she closed her tired eyes briefly, taking a moment to rest.

"You're late." Molly's eyes shot open.

He was standing in the middle of the living room, dressed immaculately and looking at her almost accusingly. Any other day, the way his cold blue-green eyes pierced her would have made her shrink back in an attempt to shield herself from the intensity of his gaze. But today was not any other day. She was tired, she was aching from carrying the myriad of grocery bags and all she wanted to do was crawl into her warm bed and get some sleep.

"I got delayed." Her voice was even, with a hint of defiance and she relished being able to stand her ground in front of him.

"At the supermarket. I know."

She was honestly tired of it. She was tired of his arrogant, condescending attitude and quite frankly she was tired of having to alter her life to accommodate him and his whims.

"Did you deduce that? Do I have some kind of food stain on me, maybe from perusing the apples in the fruit aisle?" Her sarcasm was biting and she knew she was being unnecessarily confrontational with her tone of voice but she couldn't help it. Ten days! Ten days of him being here and yet not really  _being_ here. Ten days of watching him work on who knows what, of watching him disappear for hours with no explanation as to where he's going or if he's coming back. Ten days of feeling him slip into bed next to her, but without so much as an outward indication that she was there too. Ten days of constantly wondering if he was okay. Ten days feeling completely useless because all she wanted to do was help him in anyway he needed, but couldn't because he kept her at a distance. Always at a distance.

"No. I didn't deduce it. I followed you."


	4. The Power of Possibility

**"A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us."**

― Friedrich Nietzsche **  
**

**"Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall."**

― Criss Jami,  _Salome:In Every Inch In Every Mile_

* * *

And just like that, he had once again managed to turn the tables on her completely. Whatever it was that she was about to say completely left her mind and instead she stood there gaping at him with no clue as to what she was supposed to do or say next.

"You-you followed me?"

"Of course."

"WHY?"

"Why not?"

She could feel a headache well on its way and closing her eyes, she massaged her temples hoping to keep it at bay. She didn't know what she was more surprised with, the fact that he had followed her or the fact that his tone indicated that it might not have been for the first time.

"Are you going to tell me why you're back in London?"

"It doesn't concern you."

Molly wondered why she hadn't slapped him yet. Who knew she had such vast amounts of patience stored up?

Picking up the discarded grocery bags, she made her way to the kitchen and started putting everything in its right place. She was surprised when he followed her into the kitchen and even more so when he emptied one of the grocery bags on the nearby counter and proceeded to tidy away its contends. They worked in silence until all the groceries had been put away and all of a sudden she wanted to know the truth.

"Why did you follow me?" This time she didn't raise her voice, asking the question almost too quietly.

She saw him turning towards her, his eyes fixed on her.

"You were late." His tone was clipped but she wasn't entirely sure if there wasn't something more to his curt words. His eyes almost betrayed him for a moment and for a fleeting instance she could have sworn there was something else in his fathomless eyes, something she had never seen there before. But just like that it was gone and she was left feeling even more confused than she cared to admit.

That night she half expected him to sleep in his own room. The clock on the nightstand indicated it was almost three in the morning, a lot later than the usual time he would come to her room, and she dreaded that he would stay away all together.

Molly turned on her night lamp, thinking that maybe she could read something to get her mind off things. All too soon, she was engrossed in Vladimir Nabokov's most infamous masterpiece. The words started to blend together, creating a fully vivid image and transporting her into the world the author spoke off with such intimate detail. She saw the vast expanses of the American open road, she imagined the dingy motels scattered all along the way and she watched the blue Sedan carrying its two doomed passengers to their respective fates.

The bed shifted under her and she felt the duvet being lifted up briefly. From the corner of her eye, she watched him slide under the covers and then turn to look at her. Molly gripped the red and gold book cover until her knuckles turned white. She glued her eyes to the fading white pages in front of her and willed herself to remain calm.

The next time she dared to take her eyes off the safety of those pages, she found him sleeping soundly next to her. Carefully placing her book on her nightstand, she switched off her nightlight and went to sleep, all the while refusing to notice the way he had moved so much closer to her side than ever before. When she had woken up in the morning he was still there.

* * *

She was nervous. More so than she expected. She supposed a normal woman in her position would be nervous about how she looked. Perhaps worried if her shoes matched her dress? Or if she was wearing enough make-up.  _Oh, the simple things in life_.

She spared herself one final glance in her wardrobe mirror. Simple royal blue dress. Black heels. Some mascara and eyeliner. A pale shade of lipstick. In all honesty, it was the most dressed up she'd been in months and it would have to do. Grabbing her keys off her nightstand and making sure her phone and purse were tucked away safely in her small silver clutch bag, she gathered her fortitude and exited her bedroom.

The past week had been a quiet one. He was busy, more so than she ever remembered him being and she made it a point to stay out of his way after that first disastrous time. Molly had attempted to disturb him with some food, trying to get him to eat some of the pasta she had just prepared. His habit of going without nourishment for days when he was working was something she particularly disliked. But of course it all blew up in her face. He had been so incredibly irritated with all her "pestering" that he had unleashed his keen intellect on her, deducing her to the point where she had to blink back tears furiously if she was to retain any sense of dignity. She had left him alone after that and that night her bedroom door remained firmly closed. She had thought about locking it, but in the last moment she had faltered and left it unlocked. Not that it made a difference. She had been alone when she fell asleep and she had been alone when she had awoken.

For the next three days she found herself spending more and more time at work and the few times she was forced to admit that there was nothing left for her to do at work she had walked aimlessly around the nearby grocery store, haunting the aisles like a silent specter. It was during one of her aimless walks past the shelves stocked high with canned goods that she ran into Tom again. He had been very friendly. He had smiled and joked and carried most of the conversation and for that she was grateful. He asked if she wanted to get some coffee. She declined and that would have been the end of it.

But it wasn't. She had seen him time and time again at the grocery store and a less cynical person would have thought it was fate. Molly had never been cynical herself per say, but the last few weeks had taken their toll on her and she was less inclined to play the part of the cheerful, optimistic young woman believing in fate and destiny. She knew Tom was interested in her, he had made it glaringly obvious, particularly as she knew for a fact that their "chance" meetings were anything but.

The third time he asked her out for coffee she accepted, just to prove to both of them that it would never have worked out. Molly was entirely herself during the two hours they had sat at the nearby Starbucks. She told him what she did for a living, fully expecting him to run for the hills. After all being a pathologist was not exactly the most glamorous of occupations, with most people having a hard time understanding why she would want to examine corpses for a living. They didn't understand and never would so she rarely bothered with those people. And yet it seemed that she had misjudged Tom. Rather than revulsion, he seemed genuinely surprised and told her that he had never met a pathologist before. Their conversation had progressed from taste in music to favorite take-out food to funny childhood recollections. She would have lied if she had said that she didn't have a nice time.

Which of course brought her to her current predicament. Finishing their coffee, he had offered to escort her home but Molly had of course declined and not only for propriety's sake. The last thing she needed was Tom or anyone really finding out about her "roommate". He had seemed disappointed but before she could say her goodbyes he was asking her out for dinner the following night. She accepted and now the night was here and she was really about to do this. She was about to go on a date and attempt to have a normal, healthy relationship.

_He_  wasn't in the living room like she had expected and in all honesty she was greatly relieved. If she could just leave without seeing him, that would be really good. Really, really good.

"Going somewhere?" Of course. Of course. After all, since when was luck ever on Molly Hooper's side?

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Out."

"Evidently. Out where?" His tone dripped with poorly concealed condescension and had she not known who it was that was uttering those words she might have even detected a hint of anger.

Her hand clutching the front door handle, she considered her next words carefully.

"I have a date." There, she had told him once and for all. Let the deducing begin.

The brief silence that followed was not what she had been expecting. Molly pulled the door handle, her back to the corridor and to him. She didn't know why she was hesitating so. What was it exactly that she was waiting for? Hoping for?

Molly, exited her apartment, closing the door behind her. She walked to the lift, pressing the gold and black button and waiting. She entered the lift, watching its doors close swiftly behind her just in time to mask the sound of glass shattering against the wall that seemed to be originating in the direction of her apartment.


	5. The Clarity of Destruction

**"But how could you live and have no story to tell?"**

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky,  _White Nights_

**"Some say the world will end in fire,**   
**Some say in ice.**   
**From what I've tasted of desire,**   
**I hold with those who favor fire."**

— Robert Frost

* * *

Molly laughed. Tom had been in the process of telling her yet another funny story from his university days, this one even funnier than the last. She listened attentively, trying to picture all the amusing situations he had gotten up to with his friends. University for her had been quite different. Her chosen field of study had required her full attention and as such, she had much less free time to enjoy the full college experience. She had told Tom that her university days had been mostly filled with endless reports, medical books, journals and countless hours spent in the library memorizing a plethora of complex facts and figures.

She was telling him about one particular late night, where she had stayed behind in one of the Anatomy Laboratories to try and prepare for her upcoming exams. Molly remembered the mixture of nerves, apprehension and exhaustion that exam week always stirred up. But at least she was doing her part. She was studying, she was practicing and she had even sacrificed her Friday night to make sure that there was nothing that she would get stuck on in the upcoming practical exam. She explained to Tom that even all the theoretical knowledge in the world was not enough in her field. Even back then, she had had to make sure that she practiced as much as possible. Molly remembered everything about that particular night down to the last insignificant detail. How could she not?

_She had been quietly perusing her laboratory manual, mentally cataloging the different areas that she would be tested on. At some point the door to the lab had creaked open but she had kept her eyes on the manual in front of her. Really, it was not uncommon for fellow students to use that particular lab with similar purposes in mind._

_Confident that she knew what she would have to do, Molly moved towards the back of the room, grasping the thin white sheet and lifting it. It was not the first time she had worked on a cadaver, not by far, and she highly doubted that it would be the last . However, this was the first time that she would do so completely unassisted and she had been still a little hesitant. Gently lifting the scalpel from the metal table-tray next to her, she placed the sharp end on the cadaver's skin and willed herself to make the first incision. Despite her concentration, her hand faltered and she let the scalpel drop from her trembling hand. If she couldn't do it now when she was mostly alone, how could she ever hope to do it when there was a room full of examiners closely watching her?_

_Molly closed her eyes, blinking away the hot tears that threatened to spill down her tired face. She didn't want to disappoint anyone. Time and time again her professors had sang praises about her theoretical knowledge. She, herself, knew that her knowledge on the subject was much more advanced than was expected at her current year of study. There had even been talk of allowing her to take some of the examinations ahead of time so that she could graduate early._

_Her father had been so proud when she had told him. But now, now that dream seemed to be slipping further and further from her grasp. And all because she couldn't bring herself to do what she had to do. It shouldn't have been so difficult, it wasn't like she was inflicting pain on anyone. The cadaver was already dead._

_"You are doing it wrong."_

_Molly gripped the laboratory bench, startled at the sudden intrusion penetrating the otherwise deathly silence of the room. Lifting her head, she scanned the area, trying to find the owner of that deep baritone voice which had intruded on her mental self-admonishment._

_"I'm not even doing anything!" She protested irritably, not being able to hold it in. Molly had always detested confrontation and it was not exactly like her to spoil for a fight. But then again, she supposed that she was well within her rights to be annoyed. Who was he to presume to tell her what she was and wasn't doing wrong?_

_"Precisely."_

_She still couldn't see him and she guessed he must have been standing behind one of the equipment cabinets at the far left of the laboratory that remained in relative shadow mainly due to faulty overhead lighting and cheap electric circuits._

_"This is the Anatomy Laboratory. If you're not going to practice any actual anatomy, then I suggest you vacate the premises." His deep voice practically oozed arrogance and it was all she could do not to hurl the glass bottle of antiseptic next to her in his general direction._

_Molly picked up her previously discarded scalpel and furiously pressed it against the cadaver's upper abdomen. She honestly found it impossible to recall a time she had been angrier and flipping the pages of the medical manual viciously she worked in silence for the next half hour, mentally planning all the various different ways she could use that very scalpel to inflict some serious damage._

_Finishing the mock "autopsy", she cleaned up, removed her latex gloves and tossed them with unnecessary force in the nearest hazard bin._

_One moment she was standing alone, silently fuming and the next he was next to her. The unforgiving fluorescent light illuminated his profile, giving her the first good look at him. Molly noted the extreme paleness of his smooth skin and the contrast his dark chocolate brown hair created against it. His tall frame was facing partly away from her and with particular irritation she realized that he was carefully inspecting her work on the cadaver. At some point he nodded in approval but more to the corpse than to her and she was just about ready to forsake all the manners that had been drilled into her head by her grandmother and really let him have it!_

_"Not bad. Your incisions still leave much to be desired. But they are satisfactory nonetheless."_

_Momentarily thrown off by his genial tone, she came to realize that she had in fact completed the exercise. Quickly, efficiently and without over-thinking._

_"Reverse psychology. Classic textbook case." His words confirmed it and she honestly couldn't understand what was happening. Was he insinuating that he had made her angry on purpose? Taunting her that she couldn't do something just so she would prove him wrong and do it? Grudgingly, she admitted that it had worked. She had in fact accomplished what she had come here to do, but the sheer presumption and arrogance on his part almost negated his apparently good intentions. She opened her mouth, ready to let him know just what she thought of his unorthodox methods and felt the air flying right out of her lungs._

_Molly Hooper had never been a particularly romantic girl and the notion of love at first sight was simply ridiculous. People didn't fall in love with one look. How preposterous. She knew from first hand experience that it took constant work, effort and the passage of time before any real notion of love could be achieved. Her own parents, who had been together since before the dinosaurs became extinct, readily admitted that it had taken them years before they could honestly claim to love each other and actually mean it._

_No, such foolish notions simply had no place in the rational world and Molly had always prided herself in being above all- rational. For all the good it had done her._

_And so it was with great surprise and incredulity that she had noted the way her heartbeat was accelerating wildly in her chest and the way her face felt as if it was on fire and not from anger or indignation, as would have been expected. Almost ten years had passed since that night and yet she knew without a doubt that she would never forget the first time she saw that particular pair of eyes. Not blue and not green, but drifting infinitely somewhere between the two._

Molly felt the bittersweet inevitability of her situation and she smiled sadly, looking at Tom's kind dark blue eyes that had once again proven to be the wrong shade of blue. He was looking at her with confusion written clearly on his face and she remembered that she had been in the middle of telling him one of her own college stories. She didn't know what had prompted her to tell him  _that_  specific story. She should have known better.

"I'm sorry Tom. I can't do this. I'm sorry." Hurriedly retrieving her purse, she placed some notes on the neat white tablecloth and got up.

"What's wrong? Molly? What is it?" Tom looked alarmed and she tried to think of the best way to let him down easy. She could never tell him the truth. She couldn't tell anyone. Ever. They would all think she was insane, more than they already did.

"It's not going to work Tom. I'm really sorry." She watched his crestfallen expression and she knew without a doubt that this was entirely her fault. This time  _He_  wasn't here to intrude on her date. This time  _He_  hadn't called her, demanding she cancel her plans and spent time helping him. No, this was all her doing. And how could she ever explain it to Tom? How could she tell him that essentially he was competing against a ghost of her own making, one that she refused to let go of. Exiting the restaurant, she hailed a cab, mechanically giving her address and never even sparing a last glance at Tom and the possibility of a life she was actively choosing to never experience.

Finally reaching her apartment, she yanked the front door open, stepping over shards of broken glass and stalked to her bedroom. She slammed the door shut, hearing its heavy thud echo through the silent apartment and she proceeded to remove her clothes with particular viciousness, before stepping in the shower and letting the hot water wash it all away. Or at least try to. After at least half an hour gone by futilely, she had to concede defeat. Despite the soothing warmth of the water, she was still very much in the same emotional turmoil that was fast becoming her constant companion.

Molly wrapped herself in a jasmine-scented purple towel and exited the bathroom, only to find that she was no longer alone in the confines of her bedroom. Clutching the towel closer to her body, she tried to pretend that he was not there. However the fact that he was ultimately leaning against her wardrobe and in essence blocking her access to her fresh clothing made the said task all the more difficult.

The way he was looking at her made it more difficult still and she honestly wasn't sure if the way he was staring at her was because he was about to murder her or because he was about to do something much, much worse. Something that would alter the course of their lives both irreparably and destructively.


	6. The Descend to Madness

**"Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping... waiting... and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us... guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love... the clarity of hatred... the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead."**

—Angelus,  _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_

**"I desire the things which will destroy me in the end."**

―Sylvia Plath

* * *

She placed one foot in front of the other. Slowly. Hesitantly. Her body felt feverish. Alert. She recalled a particular piece of trivia gleaned long ago from watching one of those nature programs they always seemed to show on TV in the early evenings.  _When confronted by a predator, avoid making sudden movements at all costs._

She continued her measured steps forwards, steps that inevitably brought her closer to him with each new stride. Her face was a blank mask and the only outward indication that truly reflected her actual emotional state, was the bone-crushing grip she maintained on the purple towel around her form, her right hand clutching the soft material to her still damp skin.

Molly counted her steps silently. Three. Four...Nine. She was standing in front of her wardrobe. Close enough to reach out her arm and touch its smooth polished surface. If she wanted to retrieve a fresh pair of clothes she would have to take two more steps forward. He hadn't moved, remaining as still as a beautifully carved marble statue. Only his eyes moved, watching her and watching every step she took towards the wardrobe and towards him.

She hated that she was acting this way, so easily slipping into the role that he had cast for her. But it was difficult not do. The way he looked at her. His entire body language. It was difficult to pretend to be anything other than prey, when he persisted in regarding her singularly that way. Because really, what other word rather than predatory could she use to justly describe the way his heated eyes drank her in? His gaze never wavering and absolute in its violation of her.

Molly moved, ever so slowly reaching her hand to grasp the cool silver handle of the first drawer. Her eyes were glued to the dark polished surface in front of her and when nothing happened for some endlessly long seconds, she risked pulling the drawer open. She could feel his scorching gaze on her, observing every minute move and twitch she made but never doing anything other than observe her. The creaking of the drawer opening reverberated harshly, tearing at the fragile silence that was slowly suffocating her.

She pulled out the first item of clothing her hand found, not even bothering to look and discover what it was. The quiet remained. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him, waiting for the eye of the storm to pass and usher in the hurricane. Again his absolute stillness struck her thoughts. He could have easily been a magnificent ice sculpture. Pale and frozen and perfect in its cruel beauty. She turned, once again putting one foot in front of the other. This time allowing her steps to take her away from him. Back to the safety of any place where he wasn't present. Reaching the bathroom door, she pushed against it.

He had moved faster than she thought was humanly possible. Reaching around her, his elegant fingers grasped the round brass of the door handle, sharply pulling it and shutting the door in front of her. Seconds flew by wildly, as he grabbed her. His hands holding her upper arm and shoulder with a bruising intensity and turning her harshly towards him. She was so close to him. So unbelievably close. The purple towel around her form started to slide and she panicked. Less about the towel falling and more because in yet another impossibly fast manoeuvre he had her pinned against the nearest wall.

The sudden contact between her back and the cold wall behind her was unpleasant and would have been much worse still, had her skin not felt as if it was on fire. She raised her hands and he grabbed her wrists, pinning them forcefully above her head. Her breathing, shallow and erratic, only worsened when she felt the tips of his thumbs tracing the silky skin of her wrists, where he held her with unyielding pressure.

Molly felt the hard contours of his body pressed intimately against her and she shuddered, closing her eyes and turning her head away from him. He released one of her wrists, using his right hand to grasp the side of her face, forcing her to turn back towards him. She did and felt his hand leaving her face and agonizingly slowly coming to rest around her neck. She opened her eyes, unable to fight it any longer. She wanted to look at him as he did whatever it was he was going to do to her.

Warm brown clashed with unearthly blue-green. His face was inches from hers. His lips practically touching hers, so that when he spoke, she felt his every word against her tingling lips.

"Did you kiss him?" His voice was low, so low and quiet that had she not felt the words against her lips, she wouldn't have been able to make out what he had said.

She wanted to tell him that she had. In that moment, trapped between him and the wall, both just as unyielding and unforgiving against her skin, she wanted to hurt him. Anyway that she could. Her lips parted, ready to tell him, ready to try and hurt him. But she never even had the chance to scream. His own lips crashed against hers, bruising them with kisses. He pulled her bottom lip between his teeth, biting, drawing blood and forcing her to open her mouth wider and gasp in surprise pain and pleasure. Then his tongue was in her mouth, battling with her own, dominating her cruelly.

She had never thought it would be like this. In all her girly fantasies he had always kissed her gently, almost shyly and she responded just as hesitantly, feeling how much he cared for her from that single kiss.

Molly felt his tongue flicker along her torn lip, slowly licking it, tasting the blood and she wanted to cry. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. She pushed against him but with less strength than she would, had she really wanted to push him away. He was hurting her and she was letting him. Her entire body was sizzling, alive with electricity and heat. His hands roamed down her body, past her shoulders, down her collarbone. His left hand brushing against her breast, causing her to arch into him further and she moaned. Moaned against his lips, just as his hands came to painfully grasp her hips, pulling them against his own. Sensations she never thought she would feel coursed through her and she felt everything. His lips licking and sucking her own, the soft material of his shirt clutched desperately between her fingers, his hands digging into her thighs and parting her legs slightly so she could feel him against her through the layers of material separating them.

She was lost. So far-gone. And she wouldn't have wanted to come out of it even if she could have. His teeth found the sensitive skin over her pulse point and the moment he bit down hard into it, she moaned loud enough to be heard across the London Bridge and maybe all the way to Greenwich. Had she been sane at that moment, she would have recalled how thin the walls of her apartment really were.

Nothing mattered. Nothing existed beyond his scorching mouth, burning a trail of bites and kisses on the fair skin of her neck, her shoulder-blade and down her collarbone. She was openly gasping for air now, her lungs feeling like they were unable to inhale oxygen fast enough. She was drowning. Feeling his hand making its way up her thigh, stroking the skin on its inside and moving up and up and up, until she felt like she was going to burn out forever if he stopped touching her. She wouldn't beg him to touch her there. She wouldn't.

His other hand roughly reached for the towel, his fingers poised to yank it away from her, exposing her to his ravenous gaze. She wondered if this was what heroin addicts experienced when they plunged the silver needle into their welcoming skin. Surely, this was it. This feeling of being burned alive. Of writhing in the ecstasy of delicious pain. If so, she understood why they threw away their very lives in pursuit of the next high.

The ringing in her ears intensified and it took several more minutes before she realized that over their shared breathless moans and gasps, over the ruptured beating of blood flowing through their hearts, there was an actual ringing echoing in the apartment.

Her endorphin riddled mind felt fragmented, as if it had forgotten how to process thoughts and in her confused and delirious state she didn't realize what that ringing was, until she heard the intercom buzzing and a voice calling her name.


	7. The Prelude to the Storm

**"The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way."**

― Virgil,  _The Aeneid_

**"The path to Paradise begins in Hell."**

— Dante Alighieri,  _The Divine Comedy_

* * *

His hands around her were still impossibly tight. Inescapably so. She wondered what would happen if he didn't release her. Would she have the strength and the fortitude to push him away? Would he allow her to? And most importantly, did she want him to?

The intercom was still buzzing. Urgently. Almost too persistently. Molly flattened her hands against his chest, poising to push him away. Instead her hands seemed to have a mind of their own and her fingers traitorously curled tightly in the material of his dark blue shirt.

She watched him close his eyes, lean forward and brush the side of his face against her still sensitive neck. And then he had let her go. Just like that. He had stepped away from her coolly, turning his back on her and leaving the room without so much as a backward glance in her direction.

To say she was dazed, would be an understatement. Her emotions were clawing at each other in her fragile psyche, each desperately trying to gain dominance over the others.  _Confusion. Frustration. Loss. Lust. And anger._  So much, barely contained anger. At him, at herself and at the cursed intercom that had unwittingly interrupted the delicious destruction she had been so ready to embrace.

The sound of the front door opening was enough to displace all of her confusing emotions with that of panic. What was he thinking opening the door like that? No one could know that he was here. That he was alive. Yanking the bedroom door open, she hoped she was not too late.

But the moment she stepped into their living room and saw who the unexpected visitor was, she realized that she really needn't have worried.

Mycroft Holmes was pacing the spacious area of the living room, deep in tense discussion with his younger brother. At the sound of her approach the conversation ceased abruptly, with a pair of dark blue eyes turning to regard her briskly and Molly half expected to be summarily dismissed on the spot by the elder Holmes brother. He would not consider her a threat but neither would he regard her as something of any particular importance, merely another feature of the room much like the cream couch or the delicate marble fireplace. That's what she had been expecting. Instead, she was puzzled to watch Mycroft Holmes frown, observing her closely and then turning to look at his brother with a strange expression etched on his otherwise impassive face. If she hadn't known better, she might have even called it surprise, mixed with undeniable traces of curiosity.

Sherlock on the other hand was elegantly seated, appearing fully composed and staring straight ahead, as if completely disregarding her abrupt entrance into the room entirely. The silence in the living room was fast becoming disconcerting, interlinked with traces of almost palpable tension, and she honestly wasn't sure what she was supposed to do.

Finally, after what had seemed like hours, Molly managed to collect herself, squaring her rigid shoulders and turning to address the elder Holmes as politely as her frayed nerves would allow her.

"Would you like some tea while you're here?" Molly silently congratulated herself for maintaining an even, calm tone of voice.

In the past Molly Hooper would have undoubtedly felt slightly intimated in Mr Holmes presence. Not in any similar way as she was in his brother's of course. No, Mycroft Holmes had that particular look about him, the look that spoke of no nonsense and the look that expressly warned those approaching him that they had better not waste his time.

"No, Miss Hooper. Regrettably, my visit is a short one." Molly could hear the faint traces of sarcasm behind his deceptively polite words but she had the feeling that they were aimed more towards his brother rather than at her.

"Of course. I'll just leave you to it then." Barely waiting for a reply, she excused herself and headed back to her bedroom.

Molly finally took the chance to discard her wet towel in favor of more comfortable attire. She brushed the tangles from her long brown hair and tried not to listen in to the conversation taking place in the living room. A task which was proving difficult both due to the thin walls of the apartment and due to the heated voices steadily rising in irritation and anger.

Without meaning to, she caught slivers of conversation drifting through said thin walls.

_"...being irresponsible...shouldn't be here...dangerous"_

_"...didn't plan on staying."_

_"...case then why did you?"_

_"... do with my private life is none of your concern."_

_"... it's not just YOUR life is it?...reckless...selfish"_

Molly moved away and further into her bedroom, trying to put as much distance between herself and what was going on in the living room as possible. It seemed to work, the words becoming too faint for her to distinguish them properly.

She wasn't sure how much time had passed and she was getting impatient. She was practically dying for a glass of water. And then she realized she was being ridiculous. This was her home too, she should be able to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water if she wanted to. Getting up from the side of the bed she had been occupying, Molly etched quietly towards the door, cautiously pulling it partially open.

This time the voices sounded a lot louder than before and with a jolt of surprise she realized it was because they were standing at the end of the corridor, probably next to the front door, if she had to guess. Molly deliberated whether she should just retreat back into her room and wait for the elder Holmes to leave first but the next words floating down the corridor froze her in the spot.

"...is coming...soon...won't be able to protect..."

"...know what I'm doing...should stay out of it..."

" ...one day she will hate you for it..."

All of a sudden the blood pumping violently in her ears was the only sound she could hear, completely drowning out any other parts of the conversation still going on a few feet away from her. Eventually she heard the front door closing firmly, signalling Mr Holmes departure.

She heard  _his_  footsteps against the polished hardwood floors. Footsteps heading in the direction of their bedroom. Her direction.

In the middle of the distance separating them, he paused and with a sinking, hollow feeling she heard him walk back in the direction of the living room. Away from her.

She really wasn't sure what she was supposed to make of what she'd heard. A small part of her, the part that was still rational and selfless enough, agreed with what the elder Holmes had been saying. Being here, in London, less than a month after he had supposedly fallen to his death from the roof of St Bart's  _was_ dangerous. Dangerous and reckless.

The rest of it she couldn't really decipher. Sherlock was a lot of things, her feelings towards him had never blinded her to his faults. They were a part of him, a part of what made him who he was to her. He could be arrogant, condescending, and even cruel if he chose to. But selfish was not something she would ever call him. At least not in any real sense of the word. Petty-sometimes. Infuriating-yes. Stubborn-definitely.

But she had seen firsthand how unselfish he could truly be. After what he had done to protect John and Mrs Hudson and even Detective Inspector Lestrade, selfish was not something she could ever think of him as.

It was the last piece of the conversation that she had overheard that puzzled her the most. Something was coming, something dangerous. Or someone.

_One day she will hate you for_  it. Molly wondered who they had been talking about. A distant voice in her mind wondered if perhaps they had been talking about her. But why would they? And even if they had, it hardly mattered.

In the past, she had often asked herself if it would have been easier to simply hate him. To take everything she kept so carefully locked up in the darkest recesses of her being and turn it all into hate. She had tried, if only to free herself from him long enough to try and pursue some semblance of a normal, healthy life.

And she had failed. At both.

 


	8. The Point of No Return

**"I've already told you, the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.**

**I know none other as sure."**

― Marquis de Sade

**"She loved him. But he didn't know how to love.**   
**He could talk about love. He could see love and feel love. But he couldn't give love.**   
**He could make love. But he couldn't make promises.**   
**She had desperately wanted his promises."**

― G.G. Renee Hill,  _The Beautiful Disruption_

* * *

Hyde Park had always been an especially favorite place of hers, with countless hours spent sitting comfortably by the small lake Serpentine that was situated towards the end of the park itself and at the beginning of the elegant Kensington Gardens. Molly would while away entire mornings and afternoons reading, lying in the sun or even just looking at the passerbys and amusing herself by trying to deduce who they were or what their occupation could possibly be.

This particular Saturday morning she had forgone her usual routine and simply purchased a cup of steaming hot chocolate from a nearby vendor, before proceeding to walk along the lake, lost deep in her thoughts.

By the time Mycroft Holmes had left the night before, it had gotten quite late. She had gone to bed feeling drained from the events the past day had brought, leaving Sherlock in the living room and busy typing away on the laptop he had "borrowed" from her all those days ago.

Despite her drowsiness Molly had stayed awake for hours afterwards, unsuccessfully trying to convince herself that she was unable to sleep due to insomnia and not under any circumstances because she was waiting for him to come to bed.

Eventually she heard him come in and slip into bed beside her, some time in the early morning. Pragmatically speaking, she knew he was there, right next to her and close enough that if she stretched her fingers by just the smallest amount she would be touching him. And yet, there might as well have been oceans between them.

She'd hoped perhaps that they could talk about it in the morning. Talk about what had happened between them, to try and attain at least some semblance of normalcy so that they could co-exist under the same roof without her loosing her already fragile sanity completely.

In the morning, when she had awoken after a night of fitful slumber, he was not there.

Molly hugged her soft grey coat closer to her body. The crisp breeze trailing steadily over the indigo waters of the lake was cooler than she would have expected of early spring. She wasn't sure of the exact time but from the sparse number of people milling around the greenery she guessed it must have still been relatively early in the morning.

Normally she would have never thought of waking up so early on a Saturday. The whole point of a day-off for her was to stay in and lounge comfortably in bed, pleasantly wasting the day away with reading her favorite books or catching up on the latest episodes of her beloved television series. Without meaning to, she recalled how often in the past she would imagine spending such a day with him. A quiet, easy-going day around the house.  _Their_  house.

Of course now that she had experienced what it was like to actually live with him under the same roof, her fluffy domestic fantasies sounded downright ridiculous even to her ears.

Her aimless steps took her in the direction of one of many nature footpaths crisscrossing all through the park area. It was quieter here, nestled between the imposing oaks that were scattered on either side of the narrow footpath and she honestly preferred it this way. Occasionally she would catch glimpses of the park beyond the thick canopy of trees but otherwise it was just her and her conflicting thoughts.

Molly wasn't sure of the precise moment she first became aware of the uncomfortable prickling sensation at the back of her neck. Turning behind her, she eyed the quiet area around her, scanning for any signs of movement in the surrounding greenery. Nothing appeared to be in any way amiss and after some time she resumed her walk, with the only discernible sounds reaching her coming from stepping on the occasional leaf or fallen branch.

She supposed she was being overly paranoid. After all she was in Hyde Park, in broad daylight and in the middle of Central London. All around her, hundreds of thousands of people went about their business, living their lives and it wasn't like she had wondered deep into some dark, unknown forest.

Picking up her pace, she focused her attentions on the beauty of the nature surrounding her, taking in the clean earthy smell that was so badly missing from the rest of London. She could see a few ancient looking willows interspersed with the other trees and couldn't help but wonder how many years they had been there for, standing constant while the rest of the nearby landscape changed and altered.

Molly never even had the chance to scream. A hand seized her right arm, long fingers folding around her flesh in an unyielding grip and she was abruptly yanked to the side, into the thick foliage of leaves. Her front hit the solid bark of the tree just ahead of her, its rough surface scratching at the thin material of her coat.

A warm hand covered her mouth, preventing her from calling out and thick tendrils of suffocating panic curled rapidly through her body. She pushed against the iron grip holding her in place, thrashing wildly and off balance in an effort to dislodge herself free. The hand muffling her desperate shouts did little to deter her.

"Don't."

Molly stopped struggling.

She felt the hard contours of his body pressed against her from behind and her own traitorous body sinking against him almost immediately as she closed her eyes in relief.

Her heart beat erratically, with remnants of a mixture of fear and adrenaline and she wondered if it was scientifically possible for it to simply beat its way out of her chest altogether.

His hand was still clamped over her mouth and she supposed that it was indeed very fortunate for him because the moment he released her, she planned to hurl at him every insult she had ever learned and then some more.

"You were being careless. I could have been anyone."

She couldn't see his face but she could practically hear the smirk in his voice and she was sorely tempted to bite down at his hand. Hard. If this was his convoluted way of scaring her into being more aware of her surroundings, he seemed to be enjoying it far more than he had any right to.

Molly's fingers closed around the smooth skin of his wrist, pulling his hand from her mouth and turning around to look at him.

"Noted. Now if you don't mind I'd like to finish my walk." Her tone was terse and she hoped he could see just how annoyed she was with him.

He smiled at her, a slow predatory smile that somehow succeeded in momentarily unsettling her more than when she had thought she was being attacked.

"You're upset." His voice as deep as always, held a tinge of amusement.

She looked up at him, her usually warm brown eyes flickering with irritation and a plethora of other emotions she prayed he wouldn't see.

"I don't know Sherlock. Do I look upset? Do I?" Her words practically dripped with sarcasm and she was glad to see his smirk fade, if only very slightly.

There was a short pause as Molly watched his entire countenance change. Gone was the playfulness. He clasped his hands tightly behind his back, his expression once again closed off to her as he regarded her coolly.

"I mean it Molly. You really  _should_  be more careful." His eyes were serious now and she wondered what it was that he wasn't telling her. There were so many things she wanted to ask him. So many. Instead she moved past him, back in the direction of the footpath.

Molly had never walked away from him before.

His hand shot out, yanking her to him forcefully and this time she knew what was coming. His lips touched hers, moving softly over her own and contrasting the painful hold he maintained on her body. His mouth was careful on hers. Almost gentle.  _Almost._  When she didn't respond to him, his kisses turned harsher, his hands trapping her against him. His tongue traced her bottom lip, coaxing her to respond to him. To let him in.

She couldn't do this. Already, they had passed the point of no return. Every time he touched her, it became increasingly difficult to hold back, to remind herself that this was all temporary. She knew that when he left her she would be in pieces. But if they stopped now, before it went any further, before she could successfully delude herself that he felt something for her then maybe she could slowly put those pieces together if not completely then at least to a point where she could go on with her life.

It wouldn't be a happy life but it would be something. Because really, how could she go back to pretending now that she knew what it was like when he touched her? It was no longer a question of her fantasizing about it and then carrying on with her normal life. Now she  _knew._

Her lips betrayed her and despite trying her hardest not to, she kissed him back with just as much force, surprising them both. Opening her mouth to him, she let him in, moaning at the sinful contact between their tongues. Then he was crashing her to him, his lips leaving her own long enough to whisper something in her ear and then he was taking her by the arm and pulling them both urgently in the direction of her- _of their_  apartment.


	9. The Ecstasy of Corruption

**"When she's abandoned her moral center and teachings. When she's cast aside her facade of propriety and lady-like demeanor. When I have so corrupted this fragile thing. At that moment she is never more beautiful to me. "**

— Marquis de Sade

**"I want to be the victim of his errors."**  
― Marquis de Sade

* * *

The heat of his long elegant fingers curled possessively around her frail wrist was almost too much to bear. The trip home from the park had been a bewildering blur, her thoughts scattered to the four winds and unable to comprehend what was happening until they were in the flat.

And then he was pulling her in the direction of the spare bedroom.

Molly heard the ominous click of the door locking, trapping her inside the bedroom with him, with an inescapable sense of finality.

Using his harsh hold on her wrist, he turned her, coming to stand behind her and Molly was overwhelmed with a burning feeling of déjà-vu. His covetous hold on her was almost identical in its intensity to the way he had held her against him in the park earlier that morning. Only this time there would be no interruptions. This time he had locked them both away from the world. Away from any possible disruptions.

His unearthly eyes tore into her and she  _knew._ There would be no need for him to muffle her screams with his hand against her mouth. This time it wouldn't matter if she did scream. No one would hear her. And on the off chance that someone did, they wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Unbuttoning the circular black buttons of her thin grey coat, he eased it off her shoulders, slowly letting it fall in a heap of crumpled fabric on the hardwood floors beneath them. Her eyes moved to the reflective surface of the silver mirror in front of her and she knew  _he_  had placed them there, both of them in front of it. So she could see what he was doing to her. So she could watch herself flush and writhe under his ravenous touch.

Molly looked at her mirror self. She looked at the crimson shade staining her otherwise pale cheeks. At her swollen lips, looking redder and more supple than she ever recalled them being. Last she looked into her own large dark eyes, the pupils so dilated that they consumed the warm brown of her irises almost completely and she truly felt as if she was looking at a stranger.

His pale hands clutched the straps of her dark green dress, dragging them down the smooth skin of her arms. His fingers trailed after the soft fabric, raising delicious goosebumps in their wake. Molly watched as his arms encircled her waist. His hands touching the exposed flesh just beneath her breasts and then still their burning ministrations completely.

His eyes devoured hers in the shimmering surface of the mirror.  _Asking her_.  _Giving her one last chance to save herself from destruction. To save them both._  She wished she were strong enough to take it.

She wasn't.

Molly leaned back into his body, her dainty hands coming to rest over his own on her tingling skin. She closed her eyes, feeling his mouth scorch a burning trail of kisses down her neck, his fingers tangling in her long hair and pulling her back flush against him. Exposing her throat to his unforgiving lips. Biting. Sucking. She was trying to keep quiet. Biting down on her own over sensitive lips so she could drown her moans and gasps.

She was failing.

At the sounds now pouring shamelessly out of her, something in him seemed to snap. The small modicum of patience with which he touched her leaving them both completely. He spun her around, forcing her to face him. His hands left her shoulders and buried themselves in the flesh of her hips, pushing her against him. Hard.

And then he was moving them both forwards and Molly felt the soft surface of the mattress dip beneath their combined weight. His hand grasped the frail material of her dress, ripping it down and away from her. Her own hands were on his shirt, tugging at it desperately until it too joined the forgotten heap of clothes on the floor.

Molly felt him release the clasp still holding her bra in place, the thin piece of silk being the only thing protecting her from his violating gaze. And then it was gone, joining the discarded pile of clothing and his eyes were on her exposed skin. She wanted to turn from him but he wouldn't let her.

A surprised gasp escaped from her dry throat the moment his mouth closed over her left breast. Molly felt his sinful tongue swirl around her sensitive peak, before he closed his lips over it, taking it completely into his mouth. She felt as if she would tear out of her own body any second now. Her skin sizzling with electricity and heat.

His other hand grasped her right breast, his fingers moving agonizingly slowly over her tender skin. She didn't know what to do with her hands. She wanted to touch him, to feel him like he felt her, but all she could do was clutch onto the pale gold duvet and hold on for dear life.

His lips moved to her other breast, repeating his tortuous attentions. Her hand left the duvet, her thin fingers trailing in his dark brown locks and bringing him closer to her. Closer to her skin. Her skin was feverish, blushing hotly as she felt him suckle her.

Gradually she felt her bashfulness and hesitation drift away from her, her free hand reaching for the material of his trousers and stilling on the first button.

He removed his hand from her breast, long enough to grasp her wondering hand, bringing it lower so she could feel him brazenly through the fabric separating them.

His lips claimed her own, almost suffocating her with caresses and the forgotten pile of clothing on the floor grew until the only thing keeping her from him was the flimsy material of her underwear.

His hands were on her thighs, his fingers digging into the soft flesh with bruising intensity. Her legs parted further, allowing him to place himself fully between them. With a harsh tug her underwear was ripped from her, falling on the dark surface of the floor in thin dark blue pieces.

She knew she should say something. Tell him before it was too late. Molly felt him, hot and demanding, sliding sinfully against her burning flesh. It was hard to think and practically impossible to concentrate into forming a coherent thought. And then it  _was_  too late.

With a swift thrust he moved his hips forward, entering her and this time the moan leaving her lips was more pain than pleasure.

Molly felt him still completely, his whole body stiffening over her. His stormy eyes shone down at her, flashing with a series of seemingly conflicting emotions. Mostly surprise and incredulity. But Molly also saw a few brief traces of guilt and then something else entirely. Something which made his eyes darken with possessive pleasure until she could no longer see the flecks of light green in the ocean of charcoal blue.

Her hands reached for the pale taut skin of his shoulders, her palms opening against the back of his shoulder-blades and bringing him even closer. She felt his body relax under her welcoming touch and he removed his hand from her hips, tracing the sides of her face soothingly.

His lips found her own, moving over them comfortingly and Molly was startled to feel the damp wetness of tears sliding down her flushed cheeks. She told herself that they were a belated reaction to the pain from him entering her but deep down she  _knew._ The new found gentleness with which he touched her now and the softness of his lips tracing her own reached something in her that was long forgotten. Something she thought would stay dormant forever because she had never dared to hope otherwise.

His lips kissed down her cheeks, following the path marked by the dampness of her tears until they reached her lips. In between slow deep kisses she saw the silent question in his fathomless eyes. Molly nodded a small, almost imperceptible nod. It was enough.

He started to move and she whimpered, the stinging traces of pain unlike what she had been expecting. His rhythm was slow, gentle and patient, allowing her to get used to his intrusive presence inside her. With each new thrust, she could feel growing tinges of pleasure mixing in with the discomfort and the pain until pleasure was the dominant sensation. She wasn't sure when she had first started moving her hips, meeting his movements with her own.

They were so close, fused together and Molly knew she would never again feel anything this deeply. This intensely.

Realizing he was no longer hurting her, his thrusts became faster and harder, his gasps and her breathless moans filling the silence of the room.  _The spare bedroom._  Her legs closed around him tighter, pulling him closer and closer until his solid weight was pressing her into the mattress. Until she couldn't breathe. Her hands pulled him to her even closer. She wanted it, she wanted his body to press against hers until they both suffocated, until they were irreparably joined together.

Her nails dug down into his shoulders, leaving narrow dark red welts in their path, making him groan. The movement of their bodies was becoming erratic now, faster and faster until all Molly could do was gasp louder and louder and hold onto him with all the strength she had left.

A shudder coursed through her entire body, her eyes closing and her back arching painfully off the mattress. She called his name. Again and again until his name was the only thing she knew. The only word her lips remembered how to form.

And then she was drifting to a place far away. She called his name one last time, all the air seemingly abandoning her heaving lungs. Her nails dug deeper into his skin, crimson trails of blood blooming in their wake. He gasped, his breath hot and vibrating against her lips.

He followed her soon after, moving into her faster and faster until a powerful shudder tore through him and he gasped her name in breathless ecstasy before ceasing his movements completely and going still on top of her.

Molly held him to her, her fingers stroking the shiny dark locks of his hair and she whispered something against the skin of his neck. Something she could never tell him directly but something she had to tell him nonetheless. In any way she could manage. This was her way, the inaudible confession she made against him while she was still in his arms. The one she couldn't tell him out loud.

Molly would never know that he had heard her. She would never know that the way his arms tightened around her fragile frame, trapping her with him, was  _his_  confession to  _her_.


	10. The Price of Sentiment

**"His body was urgent against her, and she didn't have the heart anymore to fight...she saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up."**

― D.H Lawrence,  _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ **  
**

**"I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed."**  
― A.S. Byatt,  _Possession_

* * *

Her eyes opened sluggishly, slowly trying to come to grips with the surrounding darkness. Her mind was groggy, unable to focus on anything and try as she might she couldn't seem to concentrate on her surroundings at all.

The only constants in her confused daze were the chilliness of the surface beneath her tired body and the vast impenetrable darkness that closed in around her from all sides.

With great effort she raised her right hand, gingerly touching the side of her face. It was wet, coated with a thick sticky liquid whose strong metallic odor could only identify it as blood. She opened her mouth to scream, to call out for help, but her lips were cracked and her throat parched with a painful dryness that prevented her from uttering anything more than a pitiful, hoarse cry.

* * *

_A few hours ago..._

She felt the warmth of his lithe body wrapped around her, his arm draped tightly over her waist and his fingers splayed out on the soft skin of her upper abdomen.

The contact between their heated bodies was not something she could easily get used to.

When she chanced a look at him, she saw that his eyes were closed and his features open and relaxed. A few locks of dark chocolate brown hair fell carelessly over his eyes and this time she couldn't resist the powerful urge to softly brush the silky tufts away, her fingers trailing over the smooth skin of his cheekbones.

Molly wondered how he could sleep so easily when  _she_  was so fully alert and only able to think about the way his naked skin felt pressed up so intimately against hers, their limbs so entangled that neither could move without the other.

Of course, after what she experienced with him, she supposed this could not be something new for him. In all the years she had known him she had never asked, mostly because she didn't want to know and partly because everyone else around him was convinced that he was simply not interested in this sort of thing.

A small bitter part of her wondered if it had been with that woman. Irene Adler. Molly remembered her name just like she remembered what the woman did for a living. She tried not to put too much thought into it, lest she end up gripped by insecurities and doubts. It was none of her business, that's what she told herself repeatedly and by the thirtieth time, she had almost succeeded in convincing herself. Almost.

The shutters on the three large windows adorning the northern wall were shut, keeping the room in relative darkness. She wondered what time it was but when she reached for her alarm clock, her hand made contact with the empty surface of the nearby nightstand, reminding her that she was not currently in her bedroom. Or in  _her_  bed.

Molly took a few agonizing moments to muster her resolve, before gently trying to pry his body away from hers. It proved far more difficult than she ever would have expected and not solely because she, herself was reluctant to step out of the protection of his arms. Even in sleep his hold on her was impossibly strong, bordering on painfully unyielding in its nature and disturbingly possessive to the point where she wanted to forget all her misgivings and all her worries and simply submit to him wholly.

And yet she knew that if she valued her self-preservation even a little bit, she had to get away from him as soon as possible. The longer she stayed, tucked safely in the comfort of his arms, the more harm she did to herself. It would be better if she chose to leave now out of her own accord, rather than wait for him to wake up and send her away. Because as loath as she was to sound so melodramatic, she honestly didn't think she had it in her to go on after watching him push her away.

Finally managing to disentangle herself from his vice like hold on her, or at least disentangle herself physically from him, she stood up carefully. Her body was sore, pleasantly so she was forced to admit, and the memory of last night still lingered on her flushed skin in more ways than one.

Molly padded quietly to the en-suite bathroom attached to the room, grabbing a folded towel from the towel rack near the sink and closing the door behind her.

_Knowingly leaving the door unlocked._

The wide rectangular mirror covering the wall space above the bathroom sink was not as large as the one in her own bathroom, but it was nevertheless large enough for her to notice the state her body was in. The pale skin of her throat was decorated with numerous bruises slowly losing their dark purple color and the expanse of her collarbone was peppered with the occasional love bite and dark red mark.

Her eyes moved lower, observing the hand shaped bruises on her lower arms and hips. Molly blushed, recalling exactly how all those marks and bruises had been placed where they were, remembering the way his lips closed around her skin and the faint pain of his teeth sinking into her soft flesh as she moaned his name.

Quickly moving away from the mirror in the hopes of escaping her current train of overly wicked and sordid thoughts, she turned the shower faucet towards the cold setting, thinking that presently a cold shower would be a _very_  good thing.

Molly let the cold water soothe her inflamed skin and wash away the remnants of him from her body. The few drops of blood trailing down her thighs and falling on the white tiled floor were a bittersweet reminder of what she had lost. And yet despite the emotional pain that would inevitably follow once he left her, she could not find it in herself to regret her choice of finally being with him that way. She did not regret her choice of giving in.

The cascading water suddenly turned warm on her skin. She had been standing alone under the falling shower trying in futile to erase his presence from herself, while all the while knowing that even if she could somehow blot out all the physical traces he left on her, she would never be able to free herself from the hold he maintained on  _her_.

And then he was there. Molly felt his arms wrap securely around her. His lips were on the back of her shoulders, very gently leaving a trail of bites and open mouthed kisses on her rapidly warming skin.

She grasped his hands with the intention of prying them off her. Instead her fingers held onto him, her nails digging into the pale smooth skin of his hands. She turned around to face him and her lips found his, her mouth lingering on his for a moment, before moving over his neck and throat in imitation of what he had done to her a few hours ago. No one could say she was a slow learner.

He was calm, deceptively so, and he allowed her to take the lead. For now. She knew his passiveness wouldn't last very long. Already his fingers were digging painfully into the flesh of her hips and she could feel the rhythm of his heart beating just as erratically as her own.

She felt his control snap under her deft machinations. His left hand ripped back the black and silver shower curtain, before closing around her wrist and yanking her to him.

In two small steps they were in front of the mirror.

Roughly prying her hands off him, he turned her around, her back connecting with the solid wall of his chest. His hands gripped her hands, pinning them on the cold granite surface of the counter in front of her. His movements had been so incredibly fast, leaving her reeling in confusion.

It wasn't until she felt his hands on her hips and lower back, forcefully bending her over the counter that she realized what he was about to do.

A pained cry rose involuntarily from her throat as he trust himself into her, impaling her harshly onto himself. His movements here fast, hard and deep, eliciting shameless moans and cries that she was completely helpless to suppress.

In that moment she truly didn't know which was more arousing, the pleasurable harshness with which he handled her or the way she could see his eyes looking back at her in the surface of the mirror in front them as he drove himself into her again and again until she thought she would pass out whether from pleasure or pain or both.

Very distantly she wondered if there wasn't something disturbingly wrong with her.

She felt the tell-tale signs of what he had been the first to teach her, slowly washing over her and she made to close her eyes as the ecstasy of what he was doing to her finally caught up with her.

"Don't." His voice was cruelly commanding and impossibly low.

His hand left her lower back long enough to tangle in her long hair, pulling it back and forcing her to keep looking in his eyes still reflected in the mirror in front of them.

It was too much. She moaned, her hands gripping the cold surface of the counter for support until her knuckles turned white.

Her eyes were locked with his as she lost herself completely, her cries loud enough to echo all through the otherwise quiet apartment.

He continued to drive himself into her, his pace unmerciful and entirely unforgiving on her delicate form. He groaned, his deep voice reverberating all around her until its sound was permanently branded in her mind.

She had never seen him so out of control.

With a final thrust, he emptied himself deep inside her. His movements ceased and he leaned, exhausted against her on the dark grey granite.

Molly felt weightless as if all her strength had left her, as if she wasn't residing in her body any longer.

She lowered her face until its sides touched the surface of the counter. His forearms were positioned right next to her flushed face and with a tentative hand she reached for his fingers. He let her wrap her hand in his, his fingers squeezing her own tightly in silent reassurance.

His weight over her as he leaned his body against her own should have been stifling, making her want to move from under him. Instead her hand tightened around his own, holding onto him.

The echoing ringing of the land-line was only a distant irritation at first, but eventually the incessant ringing became too much to ignore.

She had never thought stepping away from someone could ever be so incredibly painful. Her movements were slow, slow enough to give the accursed phone a chance to stop ringing. Eventually she was forced to acknowledge defeat.

Finally, she found the strength to move away from him. On the threshold to the bedroom, his fingers curled around her arm keeping her in place. She saw him looking down incredulously at his hand clutching onto her as if he wasn't sure what he had just done. Then his eyes found hers and Molly didn't know if she wanted to try and decipher all the different emotions battling viciously behind the sea of green-blue.

He released her abruptly, as if her skin had burned him. When he looked at her next, his face was controlled, his expression as unreadable as ever and she knew she had lost him.

Molly walked to the small corner table, picking up the cordless phone and raising it to her ears.

"Hello. Yes. I see. Isn't there anyone else who can cover for him?... Ok, of course I'll be right there."

Putting the phone down she turned to tell Sherlock, but he had stepped into the shower, a thin layer of steam already filling up the room. Molly wrestled with the idea of maybe, possibly stepping into the shower with him. But when she thought about what had happened the last time they were in there together, she knew that unless she wanted to show up extremely late for work, she would be forced to shower on her own and as far away from him and his touch as possible.

For the first time since she had picked her chosen career, Molly Hooper hated her job.

 


	11. The Inevitability of the Fall

**"But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if  
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows  
disappeared?  
**― Mikhail Bulgakov, _The Master and Margarita_ ****  


**"Good-bye Clarice. You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won't you?"**

― Hannibal Lecter, _The Silence of the Lambs_

* * *

Molly retrieved her work bag, making sure to grab her keys, phone and a bottle of water just in case. Stepping out into the quiet hallway, she closed her front door firmly behind her and turned to quickly walk down the hallway to the lift.

Busy glancing at her phone and wondering how on earth she could make it at St Bart's in time, she almost didn't notice Mrs Reynolds who was standing patiently down the corridor, also waiting by the lift. Molly raised her hand in a friendly wave and was mildly surprised when Mrs Reynolds only gave her a curt nod in return. The elderly lady had been living in the apartment next to hers for over twenty years and Molly had often been invited for tea in her comfortable home. She was a pleasant, worldly sort of woman who appreciated classical music and had a refined taste for good food. Molly wouldn't say that they were exactly friends, but they had always been on very good terms in the past.

The elevator doors slid open and Molly followed the other woman in, pressing the button and waiting for the doors to slide close after them.

She felt quite uncomfortable, watching Mrs Reynolds scrutinize her appearance and narrow her eyes in something akin to indignation. It wasn't until the lift arrived at its set destination and Mrs Reynolds disembarked first, that Molly pieced together the most probable reason the elderly lady had given her such dirty looks for.

The balcony stretching out from her flat and extending in the area outside the bedrooms was closely adjoining Mrs Reynolds balcony. The balcony she had so tastefully decorated with plants and varieties of exotic flowers. The balcony the older lady spent most of her free time in.

Molly was mortified. Even with the shutters closed, she was painfully aware that the thin walls of her apartment most probably had done nothing to muffle the moans and gasps originating from the en-suite bathroom. Poor Mrs Reynolds had heard  _everything_.

Molly took a moment to hide her rapidly reddening face in her hands. It was so so so beyond embarrassing. God only knew what Mrs Reynolds thought of her or what she would gossip about with her friends over tea and biscuits. The last thing Molly needed was the entire apartment complex discussing her and her sex life.

And then with a start she realized that was the least of her problems. The real issue would be if Mrs Reynolds had heard exactly whose name it was that she was calling out so wantonly. How many people named Sherlock were there? And even worse how many Sherlocks were there that she was directly linked to? If someone made the connection between the two, everything would be ruined.

Stepping on the pavement, Molly regretted not bringing a warmer jacket. The evening was chilly and from the looks of it, it would only get colder as the night dragged on. She was half paying attention to the traffic around her, busy pondering what she could do to ensure Mrs Reynolds stayed quiet. Maybe she could bribe the old lady with a box of her favorite liqueur filled chocolates.

Molly sighed, running a hand through her unruly hair in the hopes of taming it but only succeeding in messing it up further. She turned her head, looking at all directions for an unoccupied taxi. She really wasn't in the mood for a ride in the tube and all the effort it entailed.

Walking further down the street, she kept her eyes peeled but no free taxis were anywhere in sight. Tucking her hands in the narrow pockets of her dark grey jacket in an effort to warm them up, she felt something sharp piercing the exposed skin of her neck. The small sting took a moment to register at first and when it did, it was already too late.

She tried to turn around but her eyesight was rapidly blurring. The world turned pitch black around her, the lights of the nearby buildings fading from her view as if they had been suddenly snuffed out. The last thing she remembered crossing her mind was Sherlock's face. Mocking and disappointed. Telling her she should have been paying more attention to her surroundings.

And then she blacked out.

* * *

_The present..._

She opened her mouth, trying to inhale as much air as she could, if only to try and fuel her feeble attempts at screaming. Her muscles felt like they had completely liquefied and her body refused to obey even her most basic commands.

She was tired. So tired. Her eyes closed involuntarily, once again submerging her in a world of shadows.

The next time she awoke, some of the exhaustion had left her and she was even able to sit up. Molly leaned against the wall behind her, using its solidness as a way to support her still too tired body. She forced her eyes to fully snap open. Her surroundings were still drenched in darkness but in the distance just across from her vision was a very faint source of light.

Using her hands she started half crawling, half dragging her woefully unresponsive body towards it. After what seemed like hours, she reached it half way but suddenly she could go no further.

With new found horror she realized her feet were tethered to the wall behind her, held in place by strong thick chains. She had crawled the length allowed by the slack reach of the chains and now there was nowhere for her to got but to crawl back.

A bitter wave of despair threatened to choke her, heightening the threads of impeding panic she could feel slowly but surely building up all through her trembling body. She was cold and alone and she just wanted to go home.

The darkness around her started to recede, a series of crude fluorescent lights blinking to life over her crumpled form.

Bizarrely her first thought was that she didn't want anyone to see her in such a pathetic position, lying alone and helpless on the cold hard floor. Mustering her resolve she slowly eased her way back to the wall, perching up against it just in time to hear footsteps echoing in the distance.

For a few precious seconds she entertained the fantasy that it was Sherlock's steady footsteps that she was hearing approaching and that he was coming to take her away from this place. Whatever this place was. She imagined his tall, imposing figure stepping from the shadows and into the harsh fluorescent light. His long coat gracefully rippling with each step and his fathomless blue-green eyes looking at her calmly because of course he had everything under control.

Instead, Molly watched as a man she had never seen before confidently stepped out from the darkness. At first all she could make out was that he was tall, almost of a height with Sherlock. His long, fluid steps brought him closer and closer to her, allowing her to note the dark copper shade of his hair.

For reasons unknown even to herself she instinctively curled into herself, trying to blend in with the greyness of the wall behind her.

He stopped a few feet away from her, far enough that her chains prevented her from reaching him and close enough for her to take in his grey-green gaze that was observing her curiously, as if she were a particularly intriguing piece of a new exhibition at the National Gallery.

He smiled, a dazzlingly charming and friendly smile that was completely at odds with the entire situation.

"Miss Hooper. It is a pleasure to finally meet you in person. I have heard so much about you." His voice was pleasantly rich and cultured, his tone friendly and polite, as if he really  _was_  pleased to make her acquaintance.

And yet Molly didn't need the fact that she was tied to a wall in order to discern that there was something very wrong here. His friendly tone and his polite words were only a ruse. A distraction from what really lay underneath. Or rather what was absent.

His relaxed posture and conversational attitude served to divert attention from the disturbing emptiness lurking behind his handsome features. He smiled at her and yet his eyes were dead. Empty of any emotions. Molly had never met anyone with eyes like that. It was wrong and it was unnatural.

He seemed to guess what she was thinking and he indulged her in her careful examination of him by stepping closer to were she was crouched on the dank floor. His perfectly tailored dark grey suit enhanced his elegant physique and she couldn't help but think how ridiculously at odds his formal attire was with the dank, dismal room surrounding them.

Molly wrapped her arms around her body, desperately trying to make it appear that she was doing so due to the cold and not because an instinctual part of herself told her to shield herself from him.

His unnaturally vacant eyes seemed to miss nothing, rapidly following her every movement. Rather than dimming, his smile only widened until it twisted his handsome face artificially into something she wanted to avert her eyes from immediately.

"Forgive me Miss Hooper. Where are my manners? I don't believe we have officially met." He stepped closer to her, coming to rest just in front of her retreating form. His dazzling smile shinning down on her.

"My name is Sebastian Moran." The crude white light shone in his pale eyes, allowing her to see her reflection in their sinister depths. "I believe we once had a friend in common."


	12. The Debt to be Paid

**"I will hurt you for this. I don't know how yet, but give me time. A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth, and you'll know the debt is paid."**  
― George R.R Martin,  _A Clash of Kings_

**"What would you do to hold her again, to feel the warmth of her skin, to taste her lips, would you kill? How many men? A hundred? A thousand?"**

**"I would kill them all."**

― Spartacus,  _Blood and Sand_

* * *

She knew what he would say long before the words left his mouth. A very small part of her had always known this day would come.

"James sends his regards Miss Hooper. Or rather Jim. I believe that's how you knew him?"

_Jim. Jim from I.T. Kind, shy and endearingly nerdy Jim from work. Jim who she had briefly dated in a naive attempt to make Sherlock jealous. Jim who had turned out to be a psychotic criminal mastermind. Jim who had tried to kill Sherlock by forcing him to commit suicide in order to save the people closest to him. Jim who had blown his brains out just so Sherlock would have no way out. Just so he would have to jump. Jim. James. James Moriarty_

When she had been told who exactly  _Jim_  was, she had been horrified. Not because of what he had done or because all along she had been right next to the most dangerous man in Britain without even suspecting anything was amiss.

Molly had been terrified because of all those around her, she alone had walked unscathed from all the chaos and destruction he had caused. Perhaps if she had been more naive she would have simply felt relief, thinking that she had dodged the proverbial bullet. Thinking that she had been the lucky one to get away. And although at the very beginning she had been relieved to have been spared, a part of her had  _known_. One day the time would come for her to pay.

"You know Jim?" The words had left her mouth before she realized that she had spoken.

For a few horrifying seconds he dropped his act, letting her catch a few glimpses of what really lay underneath.

"You could say that." His demeanor had lost all its pretend friendliness and Molly almost wished he would go back to his fake smiles and faux-pleasantness. She didn't like what she was seeing.

When his cold, pale eyes turned on her again she could see the unnatural emptiness that was lurking in them intensify. Fighting the urge to wrap her arms around her body, she averted her gaze, looking instead at the dust covered floor beneath her mud cloaked shoes.

And then it was over and his mask of normalcy was securely back into place.

"Now then Miss Hooper, shall we begin?" His tone was perfectly polite but her heart threatened to stop mid-beat as she watched him reaching into the pocket of his perfectly tailored suit jacket.  _This was it. This is how it ends._

Molly let out a shuddered breath of relief. She had fully been expecting him to pull out a gun and shoot her point blank. Instead, she watched with increasing confusion as he pulled out a mobile phone, her mobile phone, and promptly handed it to her.

Her fingers reached for the phone all too eagerly, but then stopped halfway. Her hand dropped back to her side and she raised her narrowed eyes, meeting his perversely amused gaze.  _What was he playing at? Nothing was this easy._

This time he moved closer to her, kneeling ever so slightly on his haunches so as to be at her eye-level and reached for her clammy hand. Placing the phone in her right hand, he closed her thin fingers around it and leaned back, thankfully stepping out of her personal space. Molly kept her palm firmly closed around the device, unsure of what he was expecting her to do.

She entertained unrealistic thoughts of somehow managing to dial the police before he got to her, but his close proximity and his ever observant gaze fixated on her every move simply negated the feasibility of such an endeavor.

His pale eyes missed nothing and his smile only became more dazzling. He chuckled lightly, as if finding her current state of confusion, fear and barely contained panic especially entertaining.

Molly looked down at her phone screen and was startled to see that a number had already been selected for her. All she had to do was press the call button.

With growing dread she stared at the numbers brightly displayed, bile threatening to rise at the back of her throat. She refused to meet his eyes, lest she falter.

"I don't understand why you'd want me to call my own home. I'm right here." She addressed him in her most casual voice, silently berating herself for not sounding more convincing.

"I think we both know who I want you to call Miss Hooper."

She wouldn't let it happen. She would NOT.

He could do whatever he wanted to her. The fear was still with her of course, still crippling in its intensity, but now there was something else present too. Something that gave her the strength she needed to fuel her defiance.

"I live alone Mr Moran. So unless you expect my cat to answer the phone, I don't see the point in all this." Her voice was quieter than she would have liked but at least it was perfectly even, no hint of trembling or hesitation present at all.

His eyes narrowed, chilling her to her core as his hand reached for her other wrist. His fingers caressed her cool skin and Molly yanked her hand backwards, trying to pry his unwelcome touch from her person. The familiarity and mock comfort with which he presumed to touch her was both sickening and wrong.

Her struggles were short lived. His eyes met hers, looking at her with disappointment and if Molly hadn't suspected exactly what he was, she would have genuinely believed that she had somehow hurt his feelings. He was good, very good. That much she was forced to concede.

Her wrist started to ache under the steadily increasing pressure he applied. She knew what was coming and resolved that she would not, under any circumstances, make a noise. She would not give him the satisfaction. When he twisted her wrist in an angle it was never meant to go, she almost succeed in keeping quiet. The flash of bright hot pain had been unbearable but she was proud of herself for not giving in. She knew his type and with bittersweet satisfaction she watched as her lack of response to his cruelty only seemed to irritate him further, his mask of calmness slowly stripped from him.

"Your loyalty is admirable Miss Hooper. It really is. But blind loyalty only masquerades plain stupidity. Call him NOW." His grip on her already injured wrist tightened, but she fought back the tears threatening to betray the sharp pain she was in. It was nothing. Nothing compared to the pain she would experience if she ever became the reason Sherlock got hurt. She raised her head in defiance but remained silent.

And then he laughed. A genial, hearty laugh as if she had pleasantly surprised him.

"Miss Hooper, it appears I underestimated you." His tone was almost apologetic, as if he was truly sorry to have done her such injustice and not for the first time since being in his presence Molly was sure that the man standing in front of her was, if not entirely, then at the very least somewhat unhinged.

"But please don't worry. As our James used to say, there's always more than one way to skin a cat."

Before she could even think to react, he had pressed the dial button and Molly prayed to whatever God would hear her that _he_  wasn't home. She cursed herself for her supposedly sensible past decision to install caller I.D. She knew Sherlock would never risk answering the land-line if he didn't know who was calling.

As if to add to her current torment, Moran had placed the call on speaker just so she could clearly hear each torturous ring.  _Please don't pick up. Please. Please. Please don't be home. Please_

"...Molly? Where are you? You're late." If it had been any other situation, she could have cried with relief at hearing the familiar baritone voice. Instead she kept her mouth firmly shut. She would not play this game. She would not.

"...Molly? Are you there? Molly?" She was surprised to recognize faint traces of panic steadily creeping in his tone. She had never known him to be anything other than perfectly in control of everything.

"...MOLLY?" His voice was getting frantic and it was all she could do not to call out to him. She couldn't do that to him. If he heard her, if he heard the fear in her voice then it would make what Moran was trying to do all the more easy.

"Mr Holmes."

There was an ominous silence, only punctuated by the sound of Sherlock's breathing echoing from the speaker.

"Where is she?" Gone were all traces of emotion from his voice and Molly could hear the perfectly composed tone of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective.

"Safe. For now."

"What do you want?"

"Repayment."

"Repayment for what?"

"Oh no Mr Holmes. You misunderstand. I'm the one who owes you something."

Another few moment's stretched on in total silence and Molly unsuccessfully tried to understand what was  _really_  going on.

"And  _what_  do you owe me?"

Sebastian Moran smiled, the first true smile she had seen on him all night.

"A fall Mr Holmes. James owes you a fall. And I'm going to make sure the debt is paid."

Molly watched as Moran disconnected the call. She wondered how she had missed it before. The way Moran insisted on fondly calling him James. The way he couldn't resist mentioning his name in every conversation. And finally the only time seeing him show any semblance of real emotion being when she had asked him if he'd known Jim. She should have seen it sooner, after all she had recognized the signs in herself every time she spoke or thought about Sherlock.

"It won't work you know." She spoke calmly with a definite sense of conviction that she was sure she had never possessed before.

"No?"

"No. Whatever you might have been willing to do for Jim, it doesn't mean Sherlock is the same. He won't risk everything for one person."

Moran looked at her with something akin to pity. "You really are naive Miss Hooper."

"At least I'm not delusional. Sherlock won't just LET you kill him. Whatever the price." She wasn't sure who she was trying to convince more and that scared her more than anything she had experienced in the past few hours since she had been taken.

"Dear Molly, who said anything about killing  _him_?"


	13. The Edge of the Abyss

**"He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."**  
― Emily Bronte,  _Wuthering Heights_

**"I'm waiting for you. How long is the day in the dark? Or a week? The fire is gone, and I'm horribly cold. We die. We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we've entered and swum up like rivers. I know you'll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. That's what I've wanted, to walk in such a place with you. The lamp has gone out and I'm writing in the darkness."**

**―** Katharine Clifton's last note to Count Almasy, _The English Patient_

* * *

His hand was still grasping the cordless phone, his long fingers tightening around the smooth dark surface until a few audible cracks reverberated in the grim silence of the quiet apartment. His arm pulled back, his tense muscles coiling further, before he hurled what was left of the cordless device across the living room and straight onto a book-laden shelf.

The device crumpled apart on impact, displacing some of the more loosely balanced books until a number of heavier tomes toppled over onto the shinning hardwood floors.  _If she were here she would kill him for treating her precious books this way. For that he was sure._ He could picture her in his mind's eye, standing in front him. Her hands crossly on her hips, her petite form fuming dangerously and her expression threatening, despite her head barely reaching his shoulder. If she was particularly angry she would slap him. He would see the motion coming, he would know what she was about to do and he would let her do it anyway. Of course he would.

He wasn't sure what he was doing, his body moving of its own accord until he found himself kneeling over the small pile of fallen books. He picked the one lying open on the top of the pitiful pile, his eyes raking over the red and gold cover. Vladimir Nabokov's  _Lolita_.

It was the book she had been reading the first time he had slipped under the covers with her. Her knuckles had turned white as she clasped the book, her eyes glued to the soft time-worn pages in front of her. He had closed his eyes feigning sleep so she could watch him without shame, like he knew she wanted.

He didn't know what had made him do it. He had spent time in her room before of course. It had a calming, peaceful atmosphere that somehow allowed his ever alert mind to settle down, his thoughts coming together to work more efficiently. But he had never before slept there the whole night. There was another bedroom a few feet away, with a bed just as comfortable. Logically he reasoned that it must have been some psychological reaction to the events that had transpired earlier that day.

He had seen John and Mrs Hudson that day. At his grave.

Sleeping next to her was perhaps permissible that first night. And then the second night came and then the third and the fourth... he had stayed.

* * *

She was in the darkness again, the cold and the dampness of her surroundings slowly slipping under the barrier of safety her clothes still tried to maintain. She had never been afraid of the dark, even as a child. The lack of light meant she didn't have to look at her surroundings. It afforded her a precious chance to dream, to pretend she was somewhere other than where she was.

When she had been younger that other place was somewhere magical. A fantasy castle from one of her fairy tales. The depths of the ocean. A beautiful secret world, only she could see. She closed her eyes now, trying to bring up the comforting daydreams of her distant childhood.

Instead she found her thoughts drifting to her living room. The fire burning steadily in her small antique fireplace. Her hands reached out for her treasured books, running her fingers across their leathery spines and tracing the titles, some of which were written in gold or silver or plain black. Selecting a title at random she pulled the well-worn book from the dark oak shelf, it's weight soothing and reassuring in her trembling hold.

She didn't sit on the cream couch, opting instead to seat herself on the thick ivory carpet just in front of it. She let the warmth of the fire relax her, her back coming to rest on the solid surface of the couch behind her. She gently pried the soft pages of the book open, inhaling that special smell that alone belonged to an old, well loved book. She started reading only it wasn't her voice speaking the words transcribed all those years ago by someone long gone.

He was next to her, his arms around her as she held the book open for him to read. His deep rich voice was both soothing and electrifying at the same time.

_"...may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you...haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe...I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always, take any form...drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"_

"Daydreaming Miss Hooper? It's rather unbecoming of a grown woman don't you think?"

Molly opened her eyes. She was calm. Calmer than she had ever recalled being in the last few hours, all the stress and panic slowly burying themselves under the newly risen emotions brought about by her thoughts of  _him_. The lights had come on again, brighter than before and she could see Sebastian Moran once again standing in front of her.

She kept her mouth shut, his taunts were insignificant in the grand scheme of things. He was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. She concentrated instead on her surroundings. Observing and noting everything in her immediate vicinity, cataloging any useful information to be used later. The fear and panic she had just previously been suffocating under had prevented her from taking stock of her situation. She would remedy that.

There was no furniture of any sort in the large room. It was her, Moran and the four grey walls trapping them together inside. She suspected he must have a weapon on his person. Molly looked at his expensive designer suit and concluded that this was not a man who liked to get his hands dirty. It was unlikely he would use a knife to kill her. A gun would be the most probable choice. Impersonal, clean and efficient.

Where would he keep it? In his jacket ? If so, in which pocket? Was he alone or did he have a swarm of underlings outside the room, waiting to do his bidding?

Molly looked down at the thick heavy chains tethering her to the wall behind her. She entertained dark fantasies of wrapping those heavy silver chains around Moran's neck and twisting them until his eyes stilled and he no longer drew breath. She had never thought herself capable of such sinister thoughts. It had never been who she was as a person.

But looking at Moran as he had taunted Sherlock with her death, watching him smile and remembering Sherlock's frantic voice calling her name had all changed a part of who she had once been. She was getting angry and she tried to encourage the searing emotion, anything was better than the feeling of agonizing helplessness she had constantly lived with since first waking up in this dismal place.

Something must have changed in her posture because Moran stopped smiling and Molly couldn't help the satisfaction coursing through her as she saw the depraved smirk wiped from his face altogether. He had made a mistake, he never should have told her what he was planning to do.

Now she knew that he was going to kill her and Molly understood that there was nothing more dangerous than a person who knew they had nothing to lose. He had made a mistake when he hadn't killed her outright.

"You're suspiciously quiet Miss Hooper? I hope you're not upset with me?"

"I have nothing to say to you."

"No. But perhaps you'd like to say something to Mr Holmes."

Her eyes flashed with vicious anger.  _How dare he bring up Sherlock?_ She answered him with a look she only reserved when cleaning Toby's litter box. His hollow words hardly touched her now.

"Oh come now Molly how can you be so cruel? Don't you want to tell Sherlock goodbye?"

"Did you get to say goodbye to  _James_ before he blew his brains out? _"_

It was both the right and wrong thing to say to him. His handsome features twisted into something fearsome, animalistic and Molly relished the glee she felt at hurling his taunts back at his face.

He advanced towards her and she braced herself for the blow to fall. It never did. Instead Molly watched a faint light peak through the material of his suit jacket and with bemusement she realized her phone was ringing, its display lighting up with the incoming call.

Hurriedly he retrieved the device from his breast pocket, looking down at the screen and smirking.

"It would seem you mother is calling you Miss Hooper." With an amused chuckle he pressed the end button and despite everything else happening Molly couldn't help thinking how much she regretted making excuses to avoid lunch with her mother the last time she had been in London.

And then she remembered. She remembered the conversation she had had with her mother a few days ago. Her mother had heard on the news about a wave of attacks in central London, mostly muggins gone wrong. She had been upset and had made Molly promise to be more careful. Molly had been exacerbated and had told her mother there was no reason to worry. Instead of dropping the subject Mrs Hooper had only sounded more upset, telling her she wasn't taking things seriously and Molly had irritatingly told her that she was safe and that she should just leave it be.

By the time she had put the phone down her irritated half-shouts had attracted Sherlock's attention. He had taken her phone right out of her hands and Molly watched his deft fingers typing and searching for something. She had asked him what he was doing and promptly demanded he hand her her phone back. He had of course ignored her.

Eventually, after some long minutes he had handed her her phone back, a playful smirk on his face.  _"No need to thank me Molly."_ She had no idea what he had been talking about. It wasn't until much later when she had unlocked her phone, suspiciously going through all her files and apps to see what he had done that she had found it.

And she had been furious. Not only had he presumed to meddle with her phone but he had taken it upon himself to install a G.P.S locator app on the very device. Not the standard app to locate your phone if it got stolen but the full on child locator app, allowing over-protective parents to keep an eye on their children's whereabouts at all times via a contract with a security company. The offending piece of technology had cost her an extra tenner a month as Sherlock had so kindly registered her for a premium account and even offered to give access to her mother.

Molly had thought about deleting it but the contract had been so tiresome to read through that she couldn't find the Service Severance part. The app was still on her phone, she was still registered and Molly knew that if she could keep Moran distracted long enough to buy Sherlock sometime, he would find her.

Taking a deep breath, she poured all the desperation and sadness she had experienced the past few hours, trying to give off the aura of someone who had truly given up.

"Mr Moran. I'd like...I'd like...if I could just say goodbye to him before...please..."

She saw Moran smile, evidently pleased by her sudden change of heart.

"Of course Miss Hooper." He reached to hand her the phone but Molly stopped him.

"If I could just have some time... just some time to think about what I want to tell him"

His smiled faded and Molly could see irritation building up fast.

"Please just some time. Just to do it properly. To say goodbye."

Molly held her breath waiting for him to decline and put a bullet in her head. But deep down she knew that he couldn't resist the chance to cause Sherlock as much pain as he could. And what was more painful than hearing her saying goodbye, all the while knowing there was nothing he could do to save her?

He stepped back and she knew her dangerous gamble had payed off.

"Very well Miss Hooper. I'll be back shortly and then it really  _will_  be time to say goodbye."


	14. The Time for Goodbye

**"Afterward, the seven-hundred people in the boats had nothing to do but wait.**

**Wait to die...wait to live. Wait for an absolution...that would never come."**

―Rose Calvert, _Titanic (1997)_

**"Don't you do that, don't say your good-byes. Not yet, do you understand me?**

**Promise me you'll survive. Promise me now and never let go of that promise."**

―Jack Dawson, _Titanic (1997)_

* * *

Moran had left her alone longer than she would have expected. She wasn't so sure if this extra time would be enough. She wasn't sure that any amount of time would ever be enough to even begin to say goodbye.

She knew she shouldn't, but she still hoped. A part of her reverently believed that he would find her. Maybe it was foolish of her, maybe she really  _was_  naive but she believed in him. More than she had ever believed in anything her whole life.

She wished that she had worn her watch before leaving the house. Looking down at her pitifully bare wrist, she lamented its conspicuous absence. At least she would have some idea, some idea as to how much time had passed. How much time she had left. Or if nothing else, it would serve to cover up the ugly dark purple bruise that was steadily spreading on her pale skin. A reminder of Moran and what he was capable of.

She didn't want to die. Of course she didn't.

The waiting was the worse. There were moments she would feel surges of hope coursing through her and making her stronger. Making her think she could endure it all.

And then there were the other moments. Moments she would feel trapped, the four grey walls closing in on her. A few times she had been forced to claw at her throat, feelings of suffocation and drowning threatening to consume her. Logically speaking, she knew of course that she wasn't really drowning; there was plenty of oxygen even in the dank dismal room that she was trapped in. No, she wasn't claustrophobic, never hand been. Until now. And she knew that if she survived this ordeal, if she made it out, she would never again be the woman that she had once been.

It was a horrible place to spend her last moments. Dark, dirty and cold. Almost how she imagined a grave would be.

The false sanctuary of the silence surrounding her was disturbed by the creaking of the rusted metal doorway opening. Fluorescent lights blinked to life over her and she knew  _this_  was it.

She watched Sebastian Moran stroll into the room as if he was casually taking a refreshing walk in Hyde Park.  _Hyde Park, another place she would never see again._ She couldn't understand how her life could mean so little to him. In all her short time in the world, she had never done a single thing to harm him or anyone really. And yet he would kill her anyway. Collateral damage and a means to an end, that's all she was to him and that made her angry. Angrier than anything else he had done to her.

That her life would be deemed so insignificant, so worthless and by someone who didn't even know her. It was too much.

Molly picked herself up from the dank, dust covered floor. Her legs were shaky from both the cold and fatigue, but she forced herself to stand up to her full height. She would not die on her knees, cowering away in fear and she would not beg. If Sebastian Moran thought he knew all there was to know about Molly Hooper, he had been woefully misinformed.

"Miss Hooper. I trust you're ready. We don't want to fall behind schedule do we?" He smiled at her cheerfully, his hollow eyes raking over her tired form, but she remained stoic. She would not waste whatever emotions she had on him.

"Mr Moran. I want your word that you'll let me finish what I want to say to Sherlock before...before you do what you will."

Her face was blank, devoid of any expression and Moran laughed genially, as if considering her formal business like tone particularly endearing.

"Well Miss Hooper. You drive a hard bargain." His voice was all pretend friendliness. Molly didn't buy it. Not for a second.

"It's what I want Mr Moran...my last request." She would have demanded that he let her say her goodbyes in private but she knew he would never oblige her. As far as he was concerned the spectacle would be far too entertaining for him to miss. And she knew that. Truly, she was sickened by the thought of contributing to his perverse amusements but there was no other way. There never had been.

"Very well Molly." His tone was gracious, playing the part of the humbly obliging host.

She despised him.

"Your word. I need your word."

She watched him regard her more seriously now, clearly not understanding her willingness to rely on his 'word'. She didn't. Far from it. But the longer she kept him talking and in turn the longer she kept on talking, the longer she got to live.

"Alright Miss Hooper. I suppose you have my word on the matter."

This time when he handed her the mobile phone, she accepted. Feeling its solid weight in her left palm, she unlocked the screen. Rather than scrolling through her rather short contact list, she dialed, her fingers moving rapidly over the keyboard. She wouldn't call her land-line. She didn't want to know if he was still at their home or if by some miracle he was on his way to her.

She couldn't handle knowing.

The number he had given her for an emergency was her only other alternative. The number to his own private mobile phone. She had memorized it almost the instant he had handed her the slip of paper with the digits scrawled carelessly on its crisp surface. The green Call button was mocking her, daring her to go on with this twisted charade. She obliged. What choice did she have?

She had meant to keep her eyes open and always focused on Moran. Watching him, anticipating his next move. But the moment she heard  _his_  voice on the other end of the device, she couldn't stand to look at Moran's face.

Closing her eyes, she pictured  _him_  instead. His fathomless blue-green eyes that so reminded her of the ocean of her childhood home. His thoughtful expression, his mouth set in a straight line denoting absolute concentration in observing his surroundings. His dark hair, softly rustling as he strode on with the single-minded purpose of what he had to do.

"Molly." His deep rich voice was calm, emotionless and for that she was truly thankful.

She opened her mouth, ready to talk to him the way she had rehearsed. She had thought and thought about what to say. How to keep the conversation going, maybe give him some clues so he would find her. But when she had come up with this plan of hers, this plan of stalling, she had not counted on the very real possibility that this could very much be the last time she would ever talk to Sherlock.

The sudden realization was harrowing, hitting her as powerfully as the way she had watched angry waves crashing on the retreating shore from her narrow bedroom window all those years ago. And her carefully constructed words left her.

"Sherlock. I wanted... I wanted to..."

How could she waste these last precious moments by defiling them with lies? She had many regrets in her life. But these last few moments would not be one of them.

"I didn't like you at first. Not really. In the lab, that night. You were so rude. Sometimes I thought about how it would have been if I was never at the lab that night. I thought about how maybe I would have had a different life. A better life-"

"Molly-" The calmness of his tone was still there, but it was slipping. She couldn't let him talk to her, she had to tell him before she changed her mind.

"No. Please do this for me. I need you to know. Maybe I would have been married by now. Who knows I might have even started a family. I don't blame you Sherlock. I never have. It was never your fault. Because, because the awful truth is that if I knew back then, if I knew how the next ten years of my life would turn out... if I knew all that I would miss out on, all the experiences, all the chances..." Her voice was halting, her body trembling silently.

"If I could go back to the moment before I walked into that lab knowing how empty and lonely the next ten years would be and if I knew that I could get everything I wanted and be truly happy with someone else and do all the things I wanted to do in my life... just by not going in... I would still walk through those doors. If I had a million chances I would still walk through them. Every time. Always."

The hot tears running down her face were not of sadness. She had told him. She wouldn't use those three words that everyone seemed to use. They would never be enough because in that moment she knew that what she felt for him transcended them. It wasn't logical or rational and although some of her beloved books spoke about it she had never thought human emotions could ever run that deep in real life. She had been wrong.

Her eyes were still closed, her ear pressed tightly against the cold surface of the phone. She could hear his breathing, fast and uneven. In a perverse way, she felt that she should be thankful to Moran because she knew without a smidgen of doubt that had she not found herself in this situation, confronted by her own mortality she never would have told him. Perhaps with time she might have dropped subtle hints here and there, or when enough years had passed and if she ever worked up enough courage she might have told him that she loved him. But she never would have been able to tell him that what she felt for him, whether it was a curse or a blessing or both, went beyond that.

She didn't expect anything from him. She never had and this wasn't about him. She had been living with this weighing her down for the past decade and now the one thing she had so carefully secreted away from everyone, especially herself, was finally out.

"Molly, listen to me CAREFULLY. I don't care what you have to do. Do anything you can. Whatever you have to. Stay alive for the next three minutes!" And then the line went dead.

She opened her eyes, expecting to see Moran hovering over her and pointing a gun at her face. She  _did_  see Moran. He  _was_  holding a gun and he  _was_  pointing it at her.

But he wasn't looking at her. His attention was caught on something else and only then did she realize that in the time she had been talking to Sherlock, Moran had moved to stand by the only entry into the small room. His eyes were narrowed, intensely focused and Molly realized he was listening for something.

She watched him grasp the rusted handle and inch the bleak doorway open. She was surprised when he abruptly turned towards her. But not as surprised as she was when he tossed her a single metal key: the key to her chains. It hit her just below her jaw, smarting her skin on impact but she hardly noticed. He advanced on her now, gun aimed directly at her head.

"I suggest you hurry Miss Hooper. Our alone time seems to be running out."

Molly hurriedly unlocked the thick padlocked chains, freeing her ankles from their heavy constricting hold and backing away towards the wall. Moran matched her steps, grabbing her arm and forcefully propelling her in front of him.

She could feel the muzzle of the gun in direct contact with the back of her head and she froze momentarily.

"Keep moving Miss Hooper. NOW."

Molly put one foot in front of the other, holding her breath until she reached the entryway. Suddenly his hand left her arm only to rip her phone away from her hands. Her back was still turned to him but she heard the tell tale sounds of him throwing her mobile behind him, back into the room they had just vacated.

"We won't be needing that any longer, will we Molly? After all it's done what it was supposed to. Mr Holmes will soon be with us."

She felt as if she had fallen in a vat of icy water. Her steps halted and she turned around to face him. Horror and dread spread through her veins as she realized what was happening.

His eyes were shining in crazed triumph and Molly had never truly glimpsed anything more terrifying. It was like looking into the cold eyes of a rabid animal.

"Surely dear Miss Hooper, surely you didn't really think that I didn't know about the ingenious little application on your phone. I'm insulted. To think that you and your pathetic attempts at stalling could ever really stop me from disposing of you, had it been what I had planned. Really, you read too many detective novels Molly. Didn't anyone tell you that in real life there are no villains and heroes. Only the good and the better. Mr Holmes has always been good, but never think that I am not better."

It was a trap. He was using her to lure Sherlock here. He knew that Sherlock would use her phone to track her.  _Stay alive for the next three minutes._ He was here. He was coming for her. And Moran knew it. Moran knew Sherlock was coming and he was going to kill him. He was going to kill Sherlock.

She panicked. Her senses went on full overdrive and she let instincts she never knew she had take her over.

Molly ducked. Pushing her back into Moran's upper abdomen and turning to knee him in the one place she knew would floor him, even temporarily. It never would have worked if he hadn't insisted on repeatedly underestimating her.

She kneed him again, this time watching him crumple to the floor in a pained heap and she ran. She ran like she had never run before. She had to find Sherlock, she had to find him before Moran did. She wouldn't allow him to use her to hurt Sherlock. She WOULD not.


	15. The Fall

**"If it's all I can do, I'll take the fall for you.**   
**Cause I will soar when I lay down with you and give my all for you."**

― Poets of the Fall,  _All the way for you_

**"Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own."**

― Melissa de la Cruz,  _Lost in Time_

* * *

She wasn't thinking clearly and it was costing her time. Precious time that she didn't have. If she could stop running, even for just a few seconds, maybe she could have cleared her muddled thoughts. Maybe she could have even formed some kind of plan. But she couldn't stop. And not only because there was an unhinged maniac after her.

If she stopped, if she rested for even just a fleeting moment, then she risked Moran getting to Sherlock before she did. That just couldn't happen. It couldn't.

Her sense of direction was failing her. Everything around her was a shadow of blurs and not for the first time, she dreaded that she was running in circles. She was getting tired, her breaths coming faster and shallower with each passing moment.

Molly wasn't sure how long she could keep this up for. Already she was running on pure instinct, fueled only by adrenaline and by the fear of what would happen if she did stop. Not just to her, but to  _him_  as well.

_Are you okay? Don't just say you are, because I know what that means—looking sad when you think no one can see you._

Silently she cursed herself for not thinking to go for the gun when she had attacked Moran. There was a big chance that she wouldn't have managed to take it from him. A big chance that she would have just made a bad situation worse. But there was also a chance that she could have managed to get a hold of it. She could have taken the gun from him and then it would have all been over. Could she have done it? Could she have shot him point blank?

She had no illusions. Given the chance Moran would kill her. He would kill Sherlock.

The corridor in front of her, although still just barely visible in the darkness, seemed to be getting wider and faintly she dared to hope that this meant that she was nearing some sort of exit. If only. If only she could somehow reach safety. Reach Sherlock.

_I don't count. What I'm trying to say is, if there's anything I can do—anything you need, anything at all—you can have me. No, I just mean. I mean, if there's anything you need, it's fine._

It was still dark, dark enough that she couldn't distinguish her surroundings clearly and dark enough that she completely missed the tall shape silhouetted against the thick shadows merging together on her left hand side. The shape moved in her line of vision in the last possible second before she passed it and suddenly she was pulled to the left, right in the center of the dense shadows covering the area.

She didn't panic.

Her body registered the familiar touch long before her mind did. She allowed him to pull her even further into the shadows until she could only make out the dim outline of his form. It didn't matter. His hold on her was secure, unyielding and she knew he wouldn't let go.

Finally, they stopped moving. Her back hit the solid mass of wall. She opened her mouth, ready to ask him what the plan was, what they were going to do now. No sound came. Her throat felt constricted, unable to form coherent words. Instead her arms grasped at the thick material of his coat, forcefully pulling him to her.

He let her pull him into her arms. Not resisting but not holding onto her either.

She didn't care.

She inhaled his familiar scent, the one she had long ago associated with rainy afternoons spent drinking hot chocolate by her kitchen window. It was a nonsensical association, one that she had no idea how she had formed in the first place.

Had she not been so attuned to his every move she would have missed the hint of a touch of his fingers trailing down her face. She closed her eyes, feeling his hand trembling uncharacteristically, but she didn't question him. Then he had left her face, moving down her arms and clutching her painfully. As if she would disappear if he didn't keep a hold on her.

"Are you... did he hurt you?" Her arms still wrapped around him tightened in silent response. She wished she could see his face. It was what she had thought about since waking up in this dismal place. But there was no need for that now. His voice told her all that she needed to know.

_You're wrong you know. You do count, you've always counted and I've always trusted you._

"Sherlock, we need to go. Moran, he wants to..." She couldn't say it. If she said it, if she acknowledged it out loud then it became a reality. A possibility.

"Yes. Yes. We have to move. We have to move." She wasn't sure if he was talking to her or to himself. She had never seen him so unsettled and it was not something she was used to. Sherlock Holmes always had a plan. He always knew what the best course of action was and exactly just how to best pursue it. The Sherlock letting her hold him in her arms now was not that person and it was frightening.

_But you were right, I'm not ok._

"Mycroft, he's outside. His men helped clear out Moran's. I don't know if they got them all. I came in first, on my own. Because it would be faster, because it would... because I wasn't sure how much time you...Mycroft said it was stupid. He said I should wait but I didn't know if you...and then you called and I knew he didn't... I knew you were still...so I came in." She couldn't understand half of what he was saying, but she understood enough.

It was a horrible plan. Mycroft was right. Taking off on his own in the hopes of finding her was not a logical plan. She would have been angry with him but that would have only made her a hypocrite of the worst kind.

She would have done the same.

_If I wasn't everything you think I am, everything I think I am, would you still want to help me?_

Slowly she let her arms drop from his frame. Her hand curled in his own much larger one and they moved from the shadows. Quietly, almost making no sound at all. She could see him better now, she could see the sheer effort on his part to try and collect himself. To try and slip on the perfectly professional mask of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective and she knew it was costing him more than he would ever admit to her or even to himself.

Halfway towards the dim light of the corridor, she watched him reach his free hand into the pocket of his coat. She hoped he was reaching for his gun. She hoped he had brought a gun.

And then he moved faster than she had ever seen him move. He had let go of her hand.

Without having time to process what was happening, she felt him push her backwards and away from him. Back into the shadows. Just in time. But the delay of pushing her out of harms way had cost him. He never had the time to draw out his gun and when Molly followed the direction his eyes traveled to abruptly she saw it was too late.

Sebastian Moran was standing at the far end of the corridor, his hand holding his own semi-automatic and pointing it directly at Sherlock.

She froze, watching Moran move closer. Long, eager strides propelling him closer and closer to where she and Sherlock were standing. She didn't know much about guns, but she knew enough to understand that the safety of Moran's semi-automatic was off.

And then she watched him stop. His hollow eyes raking over Sherlock but paying her no heed and she realized that standing in the shadows as she was, he couldn't see her. Sherlock had placed her there for a reason.

"Sherlock Holmes... send my regards to James." Where was the gloating? The self-congratulating tone? There was no grand speech. No eloquent monologue like in all the old Bond movies she had grown up watching. She remembered seeing flashes of emotion bleeding out of Moran's usually dead eyes. She remembered watching his mouth twitch in a revolting grimace that she assumed was supposed to resemble a smile and then everything happened all at once.

She watched Moran's finger press down on the trigger. She remembered thinking that she was too far, she would never reach Moran in time. And then she remembered moving. She told herself that she wasn't sure what she was doing. That she was acting on instinct. She told herself that it was reflexes, that she had no choice. And in way perhaps it was true. Perhaps she didn't have a choice. Perhaps she never had a choice when Sherlock was concerned.

The sound of the shot rang out, loud and violent. Its echoes hitting the small enclosed space in all directions, causing it to magnify in its intensity until it was all she could hear.

For a moment she thought that she was too late. She didn't feel anything. Seconds stretched on. She was in front of  _him_  now, looking up at  _his_  face. Dimly she wondered why Moran hadn't taken this chance to shoot at them again. And then her legs went out from under her.

She fell.

His arms caught on to her, breaking her fall at the last second and he held her close against him. She could feel the warmth that his body radiated soothingly against her own rapidly cooling form. It was quiet. Too quiet. Where was Moran? Why wasn't Sherlock moving? He had to get away.

She felt his hand against her skin. Then he was saying something whether to her or someone just out of her line of vision, she wasn't sure. She couldn't hear him. But she could see him and his expression was something that stayed with her long after everything else faded. Tormented and twisted as if he was experiencing the worst sort of pain imaginable. His hand moved away from her for an instant, seemingly beckoning someone or something forward and she caught a glimpse of the dark red liquid coating his fair skin. But she didn't worry.

She knew he wasn't hurt.

He was safe.

She looked up at his face again, taking in his features that were rapidly blurring away from her. Her eyes found his own and she was glad that she could see them despite the dimness and the shadows that were rapidly closing in around her.

She was fighting to chase the blurriness away.

She was loosing.

Eventually the only thing that remained was the color of his eyes. It could have been the sky just before nightfall. But she preferred to think it was the ocean waves breaking ashore, beautiful and unrestrained. She had always thought of him along the same lines. Fathomless. Remote. Constant.

It was a silly train of thought. She had always assumed that in these moments people saw their life passing before their eyes. Isn't that what she had been told was supposed to happen?

She didn't see her childhood, or her parents. She didn't see London or her apartment.

She didn't really see anything. But she heard. At first it was just the gentle roaring of waves, then echoes of sea gulls on the wind.

And then it changed and she heard something else.

* * *

_"You changed your hair."_

_"What?"_

_"The style—it's usually parted in the middle."_

_"Yes, well..."_

_"No it's good. It suits you better this way."_

* * *

_"You always say such horrible things. Every time. Always. Always..."_

_"I am sorry. Forgive me. Merry Christmas, Molly Hooper."_

* * *

_"Molly!"_

_"Oh hello. I'm just going out_ _."_

_"No you're not."_

_"I've got a lunch date."_

_"Cancel it. You're having lunch with me."_

* * *

_"What do you need?"_

_"You."_

* * *

He moved forward, bypassing where his men were securing an unconscious Sebastian Moran. He didn't need to issue any more orders for now. Moran would inevitably be dealt with. But not right now, not when there were more pressing concerns at hand.

He approached cautiously, reaching out a steady hand and placing it on his brother's hunched over form.  _He_  didn't move, didn't exhibit any outward indications that he was aware Mycroft was there with him.

"Sherlock?" His voice was tentative, quiet. It was the voice he had used when they had still been children, the voice he had only ever used on the rarest of occasions and only with his younger brother.

He stepped even closer, close enough to see what Sherlock was hunched over of. Close enough to see what his younger brother was cradling in his limp arms.

"Sherlock listen to me, you have to let her go. Now!"

The ever nearing echoes of sirens could already be heard in the quiet of the night.

"Sherlock. You have to let go of her." It was going nowhere. His brother was still clutching onto the fallen pathologist's crumpled form, his hands trying to stem the bleeding by applying pressure to the blood soaked wound.

"I'll make sure she's safe. But you have to let her go." Sherlock couldn't be here when the ambulance arrived, he couldn't be seen.

He was fast running out of things to say. He could stand here and try to reason with his brother all night, but the look in his eyes told him that it would be in vain.

The floor beneath his expensive shoes was dirty, full of dust and rapidly staining with blood. Mycroft knelt in the swiftly filling pool of blood by his brother and put both his hands on the other man's hunched shoulders.

"She wouldn't want you to risk yourself unnecessarily-" Sherlock's eyes snapped up at him and for a moment Mycroft was sure his brother was about to lunge at him. There was so much barely contained hatred and anger sifting in their surface that Mycroft honestly thought he was looking at a stranger.

But then his eyes drifted back to  _her,_ an entirely different look drowning them, rendering them completely vacant. Mycroft had never seen anything more pitiful in his life. It was uncomfortable to watch and it disturbed a part of him that he wasn't sure still existed.

The sirens could be heard right outside the derelict building and he knew he had run out of time. He considered simply knocking his brother unconscious as it seemed to be the only practical way to get him to let go of the pathologist in his arms but he couldn't do that to either of them.

"Miss Hooper will be fine. She will and I'll make sure of that. Sherlock I'll make sure of it. But we need to get her to a hospital, quickly and without complications. If they see you, there will be questions. About you, about what happened here tonight. Sherlock there'll be questions about her too, about her real connection to you. I'll keep her safe, I will, but you have to let me."

Mycroft forced himself to meet his brother's tormented gaze. The emptiness was still there and it was sickening to behold, but there was also something else. Feeble and distant but something that told him there was still a chance to somehow reach his brother before it was too late.

 


	16. The Loss of Innocence

**"He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished."  
** ―F. Scott Fitzgerald,  _All the Sad Young Men_ ****  


**"You think your world is safe?**

**It is an illusion, a comforting lie told to protect you.**

**Enjoy these final moments of peace, for I have returned. To have my vengeance."**

―Khan Noonien Singh, S _tar Trek Into Darkness (2013)_

* * *

Breaking into the building had been precisely as easy as he had anticipated. It was pathetic how they persisted on putting so much trust in the predictable protection afforded by security access panels and identification codes. As if they could ever aspire to keep those like  _him_  out.

He had chosen to visit during the graveyard shift. It would be better this way. Less collateral damage.

There were two men stationed on every floor, doing their rounds in companionable silence and already more than eager to end their long tiring shift and go home. Home to their families, to their loved ones. To the home they still had.

_Of course, they had no reason to expect any problems tonight._ They had no reason to expect  _him_.

He had no interest in any of the upper floors. His destination was somewhere else entirely: deep into the holding facilities on the lower sub-basement.

Entering the steel grey lift directly to his right, he pressed "his" identification card on the scanner embedded above the series of circular buttons denoting each floor and watched the light flicker from red to green. His index finger pressed down on the button for the first level of the sub-basement and soon he was rewarded by the closing of the metal doors and the gradual downward descend of the lift.

It was a relatively quick journey and soon the elevator doors were open, revealing a sparsely decorated reception room with three doorways branching off into the distance. There was a number of pitifully neglected plants in desperate need of watering, most likely serving as idle decorations that were meant to distract those working in the area from the miserable bleakness of their surroundings. He walked past the single row of waiting chairs at the very front of the room and approached the small desk that was situated directly in front of him in the distance.

His long dark coat was buttoned up entirely and that was a good thing.

"Good evening. How can I help you?"

The man behind the desk was tired, his uniform creased from already spending more than half of his shift sitting down behind that very desk, a long-discarded cup of tepid coffee at his side. His expression was subdued and his voice included the tell tale signs of drowsiness and boredom that were inherently a part of the type of job he was meant to be performing. Narrow red lines criss-crossed over the white sclera of his eyes, giving them a worn bloodshot appearance. He knew he had just as many angry red lines, if not more, marring the white of his own eyes. But they were there for a different reason.

His hand drew out his "borrowed" identification card and handed it to the man in front of him wordlessly. Had he not been so obviously fatigued, the man's observational skills would not have been so diminished and he would have undoubtedly noticed the remnants of dark crimson liquid that were still coating the fair skin of both his hands. But he did not. The man accepted the thin plastic card from him without so much as sparing him a second look.

The moment the man's fingers closed around the thin piece of laminated plastic he grasped his hair, forcefully pulling his head forward and slamming it on the hard metal surface of the reception desk. Once. Twice.

When he let go the man slumped on the desk, limp and unconscious, his forgotten cup of coffee knocked over in the process and rapidly staining the thick pile of paperwork that found itself in its immediate path.

Moving behind the desk, he deftly rummaged through the man's pockets, finding a different sort of access card. Straightening up, he bypassed the motionless form slumped over the desk and proceeded to head down the last entryway on the right.

His steps were muffled by the cheap dark blue carpet under his shoes. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered.

He passed numerous doors, all conscientiously labeled with narrow blocked letters. But he was still at the beginning of the long corridor. He was looking for holding cell 77D. Soon he became aware of the flickering lights of the numerous security cameras dispersed throughout the silent corridor. Each camera pointed directly at the doorway of each cell so that when the security footage was combined it provided a recording of the entire area.

He continued to move, entirely mindless of the many digital "eyes" recording his every stride. It hardly mattered. He wasn't attempting to hide his presence.

Finally, after several long minutes of walking down the seemingly endless corridor, he stopped in front of the grey door denoting the room behind it as one 77D.

His long fingers pressed his newly acquired identification card onto the access panel on the left side of the door. After a brief few seconds, the intricately designed lock came undone with a single satisfying click and he pushed against the door, entering the room behind it.

It was not a prison cell in the traditional sense of the word. There were no bars or metal padlocks, but rather a four walled grey room with no windows and only a chair and a table to compliment its bareness. His eyes moved to the two opposing corners of the room, noting the two additional security cameras that were both obviously trained directly on the chair and table in the middle of the small area.

His entrance had been quiet and discreet, as was his habit when he moved. It would never do to give away one's presence. Despite the quietness of his approach the man seated elegantly on the spartan chrome chair directly opposite him still looked up, a small smile playing on his otherwise impassive face.

"Ah Mr Holmes. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

He remained where he was, silent and partly obscured by the shadow of the doorway.

"Come now Sherlock, we've both had a disappointing night. There is no need for such dramatics. Now tell me, how is dear Molly? Who would have thought she would have jumped in front of a bullet for you? So loyal. So devoted. Devoted to death. Wasn't she?" The man in the chair chuckled lightly but  _he_  could hear the unease lurking beneath the brittle laughter and had he not been so singularly hollow, the observation would have brought him a perverse sense of pleasure and accomplishment.

"Well, you're being very boring tonight Mr Holmes. So if you please, say what you have to say and be on your way. I'd like the chance to rest before all the irksome interrogations and thinly veiled threats begin in the morning."

He stepped out from the shadow of the doorway, unbuttoning his long coat and easing it from his shoulders. The single strip of fluorescent light suspended from the ceiling, caught in the once crisp white color of his shirt, illuminating the blood soaked fabric that was still hotly clinging to his skin. He proceeded to move next to the first camera, slowly reaching behind the main body of the device and detaching one of the plastic-encased cables, severing the transmittance of the live security feed into the electronic archive. Then he proceeded to do the same with the second camera, before finally turning to address the man in the chair next to him, taking in his wide eyes and smelling the fear emanating off him in palpable waves.

His voice was barely audible, chilling to the bone.

"There won't be a morning. Not for you."

* * *

"Sir I wouldn't...I wouldn't go in there if I were you. Sir?" Mycroft ignored the younger man attempting to dissuade him from his path towards the room. His steps, even and composed, never faltered. Not even when he came to stand directly in the doorway.

"Who found him?" His eyes raked over the macabre tableau displayed in front of him, moving over the dense pools of congealing blood scattered over the small area of the once secure cell.

"The security guard sir. When he came to he raised the alarm and started looking around. Nothing appeared to be amiss but then he mentioned that he noticed the door to this cell was open so he proceeded to investigate."

Mycroft nodded absentmindedly, his eyes inescapably drawn back to the grizzly scene before him.

"And the security guard? I'd like to question him, personally." When he turned his attention back to the young Agent next to him, he noted his unease and his reluctance to meet his eyes.

"Agent?"

"Sir it's just... pardon my interference sir, but the poor chap is really not up to answering questions just now. I mean after what he's seen, after seeing all this. Perhaps if we might ah...reschedule?

Under different circumstances, Mycroft never would have considered such an option. Time was the most precious of currencies and wasting it was not his habit.

"Very well Agent." He forced himself to step into the room, he forced himself to look carefully at all the blood staining the walls, the floor and even parts of the ceiling. He forced his eyes to look at the broken sad thing that had once been Sebastian Moran, lying so carefully arranged and twisted beyond recognition in the very center of the confining space, until it was all ingrained in his memory. Permanently.

He could never afford to forget. He could never allow himself the luxury to forget just exactly what his little brother was capable of.

_Sherlock, what have you done?_

* * *

The storm had seemingly materialized out of thin air.  _Angry. Vengeful. Resolute._  The constant sound of the relentless rain tapping against glass slowly penetrated the absolute silence clinging onto everything. It was among the first things she actively registered hearing after her long absence, the fearful absence that had invaded her senses. The absence that had cut her off.

She was warm, warmer than she would have normally preferred. But she didn't mind. Not this time.

It was exceedingly difficult to stay where she was. A part of her was latching onto the sounds of the storm that tried to anchor her to the conscious world so desperately. But that part was weak, weaker than the part that pulled her under and far from the reassuring sound of thunder echoing in the distance. She didn't like that second part of her. She didn't want to leave the sounds and the smells of the conscious world behind.

She didn't want to leave  _him_  behind.


	17. The Promise of Hope

**"We are all a volume on a shelf of a library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands. A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as fiesty; we are thickly layered, page upon lying page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together."  
― **Deb Caletti

**"I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home."  
** ― Joanna Harris

* * *

He reached out, his hand hovering over her own. He yearned to touch her, to lace his long fingers through hers but he didn't. He couldn't.

Logically, he was fully aware that he was not solely responsible for the current turn of events. He had never asked for any of this and certainly he had never asked for her to feel this way about him. In the past it had been an unfortunate inconvenience, something whose existence he could never fully understand simply because it was precisely something that he had never encouraged. Something for which he had never before had any use.

He had been rude, he had been remote and he had constantly rebuked each and every attempt on her part to reach out to him. Perhaps it had been cruel, perhaps  _he_  had been cruel but at least in the past he had only ever been responsible for causing her emotional pain. Emotional pain could be crippling and even unbearable in its own way. He could recognize that much. But emotional pain didn't tear a hole through your artery, emotional pain didn't make you bleed out or put you in the hospital. Not on its own.

His storm riddled eyes drifted over her smaller form, the bleached whiteness of the sheets around her making her soft skin seem even paler, almost translucent in its sheen. She was serene and familiar but not quite what she had once been and much like a painting whose color had grievously but inevitably faded, leaving behind only a semblance of its former glory.

It wouldn't last. This grey, faded stasis that she was currently in would soon dissipate.

All too soon her rosy pallor would return, her smooth cheeks flushing with color again and her lips once more retaining that pastel shade of earthy pink that had always been their native hue. He knew this, he could see it in his mind's eye as easily as he could note how the only source of color currently on her person seemed to originate from her long dark locks, splayed messily over the expanse of her pillow and down her shoulders.

He knew it would happen just as he knew that he would not be here to witness it. Somewhere on a private runway, probably near some long abandoned fields and farmhouses, a private jet would soon touch down. The jet he would board on the journey to his self imposed exile, the exile that his older brother thought would serve as his penance.

He didn't object to the whole notion, perhaps on some level he did deserve to serve a penance, to make amends. But not for the perceived offence that his brother and the Secret Services presumed to attribute to him. If there was one thing he had to make amends for, it would be for the way the myriad of tubes and needles marred and pierced the soft skin of the woman in front of him. It would be for not being able to battle his own willfulness, for failing to reign himself in. For failing to reign in his desires, the very desires that wrought nothing but destruction and pain to the single person who inexplicably valued him more than she valued anything else. Even her own safety and her own well-being.

He was only supposed to stay the night, that one first night was also supposed to be the last. He had stumbled to her apartment tired and lost and in need of a few moments of precious peace. In the morning he had walked to the kitchen, intending to simply grab a quick cup of coffee and be on his way. Next to the already prepared coffee that was still steaming in its pot, he had seen the box of sugar cubes and directly next to that he had seen the coffee mug and the spoon. All laid out for him, all already prepared for his use, as if she had anticipated his every need.

It became a common theme of their brief cohabitation, this uncanny ability of hers to know what he needed before he even thought to ask for it. It was disconcerting and had he been a lesser man he would have tried blaming it all on her. She had made him believe in the idea of a home again, perhaps not the home he had once shared with John, but a home nonetheless.

And then everything had changed and  _home_  was no longer the apartment they shared, it wasn't a space enclosed by four walls or even the sanctuary of his own mind.  _Home_  had become something else entirely to him, it had ceased to be an inanimate thing, it had ceased to be an object.  _Home_  had become a person. It had become  _her_.

He had tried to despise her for it. It was cruelty in its most innocent nature. She couldn't possibly ever perceive the sheer magnitude of the torture that she unwittingly inflicted on his all too willing person. It wasn't safe for him to stay with her, it wasn't safe for him to be around her just as it wasn't safe for her to be around him. But he had wanted to, he had wanted to and he had stayed. In the end she had paid the price for his lamentable weakness.

He could never take back what already was and deep down in the most secretive recesses of his tarnished self he was selfishly glad for it. Perhaps if he had been different, if he had been someone other than who he was, then he would have at least considered how her life would have turned out if he wasn't in it. She had told him that she didn't blame him and her words should have brought him nothing but relief. But he knew, he knew that even if she had said that she blamed him, it wouldn't have mattered. He could never wish that he wasn't a part of her life, anymore than he could endure the thought of her having a life that wasn't a part of his own.

Still, even if he had failed her in the past, he would at least do this for her now. He would do what he was supposed to have done the moment he had realized just how complex and dangerous Moriarty's network truly was, because he knew that if he ever hoped to have a life that wasn't drenched in shadows and lies then he had to disband what was left of the web of deceit and intrigue that James Moriarty had so artfully created.

It would be the second time he would leave his life behind. And looking down at her sleeping so peacefully in the narrow hospital bed, he had no desire to continue lying to himself. His hand reached out slowly, carefully brushing away the loose strands of soft brown hair from her smooth cheeks. He heard her breathing change, her eyelids fluttering for a few brief moments but he knew she would not wake. Not yet. It was one of the few times in his life that he had felt truly torn. It would be easier if she remained asleep, he could tell her what he wanted her to know, what he wanted her to always remember and then he could leave. If she was asleep, she couldn't stop him. She couldn't look at him with knowing dark eyes and see what he had so carefully tried to keep a secret from the both of them, what he had just come to realize and the effect it had had on everything he thought he knew.

But then another part of him wanted her to wake up, to stop him. He imagined her waking up just as he was about to leave the room, her hands reaching for him and keeping him in place. Keeping him from leaving her. He imagined that he was able to tell her the truth, that he was able to acknowledge out loud exactly what had changed between them. He imagined telling her everything.

Her eyes remained closed even as he leaned in to whisper a few quiet words against her lips. Her breath was warm against his mouth and his lips moved over her own, savoring her taste and trying to imprint it into his memory.

* * *

She was dreaming and then she wasn't.

He was here, his lips moving gently over her own and she knew that this time it was not a dream. He really was here, in the room with her, his fingers brushing soothingly through her long hair. She flexed her hand trying to get his attention, to let him know that she was here too, that she could feel him. But her body seemed reluctant to obey instructions, her limbs weighing her down like pure iron and completely uncooperative to her orders.

And then he was gone, cold air replacing the warmth of his soft lips against her own. She was desperately trying to clear the haze that was keeping her in this semi-conscious state. Her mind was awake, but her body was not. She was still tired, so unbelievably tired, but she had to do something before he left. She knew what he was going to do, she had heard his deep baritone voice quietly telling her that he was leaving. That he had to leave London, that he had to leave her. She wanted to stop him, but that wasn't the only reason she was so viciously fighting to gain control of her body.

He had told her he was leaving but he had also told her something else, something that she had never dared to even think could ever be possible.

The door to the room creaked open, the sound registering and letting her know that she had run out of time. She heard his steady footsteps retreating from her and she knew it was over.

He was gone.

The only thing she could hold on to was his parting words and she did, lest she tear herself apart from the intensity of the emotions ripping away at her. Because now she  _knew_  and the knowledge of what he had told her filled her with something she had thought long gone.

_The promise of hope._


	18. The Reality of Dreams

**"Why have you not come back to me? Every day...I wait for you. My one waking thought has been of you."**

―Wuthering Heights (1992) _  
_

**"Tristan, I have nowhere to send this letter and no reason to believe you wish to receive it. I write it only for myself. And so I will hide it away, along with all the things left unsaid and undone between us."**

―Susannah Fincannon's letter to Tristan Ludlow,  _Legends of the Fall (1994)_

* * *

_The windows were open, steadily letting in the cool night air that brought with it the sounds and smells of the ever alert city around her. The high pitched wail of sirens was on the wind, as were the echoes of speeding cars and the distant chatter of pedestrians walking the busy streets. Central London was not a place to hear the sea gulls nor was it a place to breathe in the clean salty air of the ocean. Nonetheless, both the sounds and smells that made it what it was were beautifully unique in their own way._

_She was on the balcony, wrapped up carefully in a warm pale blue shawl. Her view of the city was a good one, and she loved sitting out on the balcony some nights and observing the bustling metropolis that was London._

_She spared a quick look at the balcony situated directly next to hers but it was empty: Mrs. Reynolds was not there sitting comfortably among her many exotic plants and well-kept flowers. A glance at her wristwatch confirmed that the time was well past midnight. The older lady must have already been asleep. Molly herself had to get up early the next day for work but she didn't want to turn in for the night. Not yet._

_Her eyes traveled over the expanse of London that she could make out in the distance, looking past the quiet grounds that comprised Hyde Park and taking in the distant lights of Kensington. The door of the apartment clicked open quietly enough that the city noise would have normally hidden its sound. But not tonight. Tonight she had been expecting that particular sound all evening._

_She heard steady, measured footsteps coming her way from the living room and then the sound of the silky curtain fabric parting. Without looking she knew that he_ _had stepped onto the balcony with her. She could feel the warmth of his gaze travelling over her form and she smiled._

_She had missed him._

_He stepped closer to her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her flush against his warm body. She leaned into him all too willingly, closing her eyes for a few precious seconds and exhaling in quiet contentment._

_"How was your day? Did John remember where he put his notebook?" Her voice was quiet against the backdrop of the city noise but she knew he would hear her. He always did._

_"It was surprisingly uneventful. And no, regrettably he's still looking for it. How was your day?" _His own deep, calming tone of voice was both deliciously familiar and comforting in its own way.__

_She kissed him, turning herself around in the hold of his arms and finding his slightly chapped lips with her own. His arms closed in tighter around her, pulling her impossibly close to the hard contours of his taller, larger body. His left hand tangled in her dark hair, bringing her mouth even closer against his own._

_She never told him that she missed him with words; they seemed both too trivial and too woefully inadequate to really express what she felt when he wasn't with her. It was both a strange and new concept for her, and she could never before recall actively needing someone to be near her with this all consuming desire. Always independent and always most happy when in the presence of her own company, she couldn't help but wonder at the strange turn of events that had so altered whom she had once been. Of course she supposed that after the incident with Moran it made sense that she would experience some changes. It was understandable even._

_His mouth left her lips and trailed hotly on the sensitive skin of her neck, pushing away any unpleasant thoughts of the past. Her hands clutched at his shoulders, trying to steady herself. She knew he would never let her fall, he hadn't let her fall even on that distant night in Moran's dingy basement corridor when she had jumped in front of him at the last possible moment._

_His deft fingers unbuttoned the small pearl white buttons of her blouse, slowly revealing the smooth skin of her chest and upper abdomen. His index finger traced over the small white scar on the right of her collar, his lips pausing their sinful ministrations long enough for him to lower his eyes to her scar. The bright orange of the street lights caught in the blue-green depths of his eyes, letting her see all the emotions reflected in them. Molly reached out for him then, soothingly caressing the smooth skin of his cheek. She smiled at him reassuringly, hoping that one day he would understand that of all the regrets and of all the things that she wished she could take back in her life, the night she had stepped in front of him in Moran's basement was not one of them_.  _She knew now with a certainty that she hadn't possessed that night that had she not stepped in, Sherlock would be dead. Moran had been aiming for his heart and so when she, so much shorter than Sherlock, had taken the bullet it had still been painful, but it had not been fatal. She wished that he would accept this fact, something that even the doctor responsible for her recovery had confirmed for them repeatedly at her request._

_Her lips sought his own again and she felt the warmth of his mouth on her own more urgently than before. Her back collided with the solid glass of the balcony door and in that moment she was truly grateful that her neighbors had chosen to turn in for the night._

_His strong hands lifted her off the white granite floor and she took the chance to wrap_ _her legs securely around him, pulling him even closer to her feverish body._

_And then everything changed._

_Her hands were left grasping at nothing as he was gone from her, disappearing as if he had never been there in the first place. The contentment and happiness she had felt dissolved along with the remnants of her dream and she felt herself realizing that none of this was real. All too soon she would wake up and she would be alone. She would open her eyes to the darkness of her bedroom and find that she was not living the life of her dream but rather a very different version of it. The version in which he was not there, the version where all that she had left of him was the fading memory of his presence in her life._

* * *

The walk home from the small flower shop at the end of her street was a surprisingly pleasant one. The warm summer rain had abated and been replaced instead by a comforting light breeze that rustled her unbound hair and the thin material of her grey coat. She was glad the rain had stopped as she hadn't bothered to take an umbrella with her in her short journey just down the road. It had hardly seemed necessary.

Entering the apartment, she took off her grey jacket and meticulously placed it on the silver hanging hook by the doorway. Removing her shoes and moving to the large French windows adorning the far end of the living room, she carefully arranged the newly purchased white roses in their usual square glass vases. The contrast created by the white rose petals against the dark wood frame of the large windows was something she had always liked.

Lately she had been dreaming. She had been dreaming more so than usual and with a greater intensity. Molly had always been able to recall her dreams, at least to some extend the next day, but never before had her dreams been so vivid or so achingly lucid.

The first few weeks after she had been released from the hospital she found herself trying to remain asleep more and more. There were whole days she would dream away, only waking up a sparse few hours here and there just long enough to drink some water or eat an apple. At first it was easy to pretend that she needed her sleep to rest and heal. That was all. Eventually she had stopped lying to herself and simply acknowledged the harsh truth of the matter. Her dreams were better than her reality.

The fourth week since her release from the hospital things had changed. She had woken long enough to grab a glass of cold water and on her way to the kitchen she had caught a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror. Dark purple crescents shaded the skin under her red-rimmed eyes. Her skin was becoming sallow, sickly in its paleness, and she could see that her delicate collar bones were starting to jut out dangerously from her thinning frame. The young woman in her reflection was unrecognizable, she was someone else, someone who Molly Hooper would never allow herself to become.

She had started making small changes to her routine after that. She found herself once more turning to her beloved books in order to distract herself. She started going to Hyde Park and of course it was as she had left it, unchanged and beautiful in its own timeless manner. Gradually, she returned to some semblance of her former life. She went back to work, she forced herself to accept invitations to lunch and she forced herself to smile at least once a day. Even if she didn't mean it, even if it was an empty, lifeless smile.

She tried.

Once the roses were in their rightful place Molly moved to the kitchen, putting out some food for Toby and making a cup of tea with honey for herself. Cup in hand, she stepped from the kitchen into the living room and then to the hallway towards the bedrooms. Her footsteps were even and composed, failing to falter even when she crossed by the threshold to  _his_  room.

He had only ever stayed in it for a few weeks, not even a full month, but it was long enough. Long enough for her to admit to herself that that room had never been a  _spare_  bedroom. Not truly.  _Spare_  implied that sometime in the future there was a possibility that it would be filled or used for some purpose or other. It implied that there was a chance for a different sort of life, a life without him present.

* * *

_Four months later..._

Everything she would be taking was almost packed. The moving truck was double parked outside and she had already said her goodbyes to Mrs. Reynolds.

She wouldn't take the furniture, nor anything that was too heavy or too bulky. The real estate agent had persistently advised her that she would do good to sell the place for once and for all. He had told her that with the current demand for property in Central London she would make back almost three times what she had spent in buying the apartment in the first place. He had made for some very convincing arguments and she had almost admired his tenacity regarding the subject. It was a good move and the current market was never more appropriate for it.

She wasn't interested. Although it made sense financially and although she knew that logically there was no reason for her to hold onto this place and incur the cost of maintenance for both this flat and the new property she had purchased, she refused to consider selling it.

With her she would only take her personal belongings, her clothes and of course her books. The room that had once served as the spare bedroom now looked pitifully empty and bare with all of the dark bookshelves stripped of their precious cargo. But there was no help for it. She had already left too much behind in that room, without having to leave behind her treasured books too.

She wouldn't lift any of the heavy boxes currently lined up in the hallway. Not in her current condition. Any minute now the movers would knock on her door and ask her if she was ready for them to start loading her things onto the sturdy truck parked outside.

Perhaps if things had turned out differently then she would have stayed. She would have continued going through the motions, living and not really  _living_  at the same time. If things were different perhaps she would have spend the rest of her days with her life tied to this apartment, always waiting. It would have been easier, but for the first time in her life she wasn't even remotely interested in doing what was easy.

London would always be her home, the place in which she had felt the most happy and the most desolate. But she needed peace. She needed the soothing isolation of the ocean: its constancy and its solitude that had been a part of her everyday routine for the first seventeen years of her life. She would go back and she would spend some time by its shores. She owed it to herself to try and regain some sense of whom she had been before.

She wouldn't let herself linger in the apartment once the movers had left. She would make sure the windows and balcony doors were locked and then she would pick up her handbag and her rapidly tightening grey coat and she would lock up. She would get into the black and gold lift one last time and she would descend to the ground floor. Ed, the elderly porter had already been informed of her departure and he would wait for her with a taxi hailed outside for her convenience.

She would tell the taxi driver to take her to St. Pancras International Station and then she would spare a last glance at her left window, looking at what had served as her apartment building since her arrival in London almost a decade ago and she would smile. Someday she would return here and perhaps if the occasion called for it, she would share her story with the person accompanying her and she would be truly grateful for all that she had experienced and all that she had learned inside those walls.

But for now she had a train to catch, the train that would bring her to a small seaside town and to a beautifully remote cottage by the ocean shore.

What she would never know until much later, would be that on that same day a letter would arrive for her at the apartment she had once called home. The letter would be the first of many and they would all go unanswered. Then late night telephone calls would follow, all of them from blocked numbers but those too would remain unanswered.

She wouldn't be there.

And perhaps, it would be this conspicuous absence that would prompt the person on the other end of the missed phone calls and the unanswered letters that enough time had passed.

_It was time to come home._


	19. The Beginning  of the End

Chapter 19: The Beginning of the End

**"We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there."**  
― Pascal Mercier,  _Night Train to Lisbon_

**"I have crossed oceans of time to find you."**  
— Count Dracula to Mina Murray,  _Bram Stoker's Dracula(1992)_

* * *

Golden-white sand sunk under the weight of hurried steps.

Pale green reeds and brown vegetation were scattered haphazardly all along the path, slowly drying up under the ever constant attack of sea salt and under the relentless onslaught of the winter wind. The faint cries of seagulls, circling hungrily over the grey sea, traveled in the chilly air and served to mask any sounds of his quiet approach.

Just ahead of him in the distance he could see it, a single house against the back-frame of the indigo blue waters of the Great Ocean.

The aged building was modest at best and yet strangely welcoming, painted in comforting shades of pearl white with bright blue windows and a small garden growing close towards the borders to the rocky shore.

It was not the spacious city apartment he had once known, there was no urban finesse or synthetic elegance here. And yet, even in this place that was so close and yet so far from anything he had previously known, there were still some familiar remnants of the past shinning through for those who cared to notice them.  _He_  could see them in the carefully chosen white roses adorning the windows, or in the cream and pastel colors of the thin curtains rustling silently in the breeze.

The windows were fully open, and as the smooth curtain fabric was parted by the resilient force of the wind, he caught glimpses of the interior of the quaint little cottage. As he neared, he noticed that the back door was also open, his eyes immediately drawn to the lone figure moving through the open doorway with a plastic silver tray in hand. Green-blue eyes followed the figure, tracking its movements towards the patio. He watched as the figure set the tray and its contents on the nearby lawn table and then carefully proceeded to pour a good amount of what could only be deduced as tea, into a lilac-purple mug.

He started moving faster then, his eager steps quickly diminishing the distance separating him from her. The last rays of the setting sun were on his pale face now, their warm light rendering the gold flecks in the ocean of his irises more pronounced, until the cold blue was chased away, leaving in its stead a vibrant green-gold.

She was exactly as he remembered, the image of her forever burned into his mind and occupying some of the most private rooms of his Mind Palace.  _Rooms that he hand't allowed himself to visit in a very long time_. The sun caught in the dark shine of her hair, tied as always in its customary ponytail and kept well away from her delicate face. It was always thus and one of the very first things he had come to observe about her as she, ever so practical in her nature, could never allow anything to get in the way when she was working.

The closer he got the clearer he could see her, and today it seemed that a few stubborn strands of brown hair had escaped the confines of her ponytail, stirring slightly in the restless breeze. If he had been closer he would have reached out, his long fingers softly brushing the strands away from her soft skin.

_He had gone back for her._

_S_ _tanding in front of the gold and black door to her apartment, to their apartment, he had retrieved his spare key. Always with him and always secured safely somewhere on his person, it had been the one trivial object he had taken with him in his many travels, even when he could take nothing else._

_Standing there, on the proverbial threshold to his past, his hands had trembled uncharacteristically with a mixture of anticipation and suffocating need, but he had finally managed to unlock the door and step inside the once familiar space._

_She was not there, she had not been there for a long time and t_ _hat much he could tell almost instantly._

_A pile of unopened letters was scattered pitifully on the dark hardwood floors, the white of the expensive paper turned grey from mingling too long with the dust dancing on the air. There was no need for him to open the letters, he knew all too well what their contents pertained to. They were addressed from all over, a small wonder in their own in that so many of them had made it here, in the heart of modern civilization, from even the most remote and isolated corners of the planet._

_It would have been so easy to leave right there and then, to turn back and to cease his pursuit of what was clearly not meant to be. The unopened letters told him all that he needed to know, but still in that moment it seemed not to be enough to quench his new found need for self-torture and despite knowing that little good would be gained from it, he forced himself to move past the painful reminder of his long absence and further into the apartment._

_The furniture was still there, dusty white sheets draped over the cream couch and the leather armchairs in an effort to protect them from the relentless passage of time. There were still roses on the window ledges but they were dead, the color and scent leached out of them long ago. He wondered why she had left them there, why she had tidied and packed away everything else but had chosen to leave the roses there to wilt and decay in her absence. Logically, it did not make any sense and it was not like her to leave things unfinished._

_That was something that he always seemed to do._

_His steps had had a will of their own, gradually pulling him down the path of the long corridor and coming to rest just outside the spare bedroom. His fingers curled around the silver handle, pushing until the door gave away with a lonely creak and then he was inside the room in which he had left a part of himself all those years ago. Her books were gone, the mahogany shelves strangely empty as if the very soul of the room had disappeared away with her._

_His hand traced the soft gold coverlet of the bed. Remembering. Reliving._

_It was too much. Too much._

_He had left, closing the door firmly behind him, but he hadn't given up. Standing in the shadow of the life he had left behind, he had made a vow, h_ _e would not stop looking._

His brother had been uncharacteristically eager to aid him in his search, providing him with a single paper displaying a few short lines of scribbled writing. An address, somewhere far away from where he had first seen her almost a decade and a half ago. And now he was here and she was standing less than a few feet away from him.

He moved from the shadows of the withering trees behind him and into the purple red light of the fast approaching sunset.

The lilac mug slipped from her fingers, shuttering on impact with the patio floor and expelling shards of glass and rivulets of honey-shaded liquid everywhere in its destructive wake. He watched her eyes, always so unreadable to him in the past, flash with a series of disorienting emotions. Her hands clutched desperately on the back of the nearest chair, her strength completely abandoning her body.

He started moving faster, and then he froze.

Out of the open doorway exited another figure. His eyes snapped violently away from her, his heart beating viciously in his chest as if the oxygen in his lungs was no longer sufficient for him to keep breathing.

His mind struggled to make sense of the image before him as he watched the boy, no more than three or four years of age, come slowly out of the house.

* * *

The boy turned his head, searching out for whatever it was that had so captured his mother's attention and his eyes eventually landed on the tall form of a man standing completely still a few feet away from them. Inquisitive by nature, his curiosity overshadowed his shyness and he approached the man, albeit very cautiously.

"Hello sir." His mother had taught him the necessity of good manners and even at his young age, he understood the importance of being polite and behaving in a way that would make his mother proud.

The man regarded him for a few quiet moments, and then slowly moved down on his knee, so that he was almost at a height with him.

"Hello." The man's voice was deep and resonant, but there was a slight tremor in his words as if he was just barely holding back something. "And what is your name?"

The boy smiled, studying the man closely with childish curiosity. "I'm William." Then he paused for a moment, intrigued by the green-blue color of the stranger's eyes. He could see flecks of gold dispersed in the green-blue and that pleased him. Other than looking at his own eyes in the large living room mirror, he had never seen another person with the same pattern of golden flecks in their irises."William Sherlock Scot Jr."

The boy waited expectantly for the man to introduce himself, that was the proper way to go about it. William had told him his name and now the stranger was supposed to tell him his. Instead the man looked at him with something akin to wonder.

Eventually the man seemed to find his voice and he smiled back, his fathomless eyes shinning brightly with some small new-found traces of moisture.

"That's quite a name."

But William was not wholly paying attention. He was distracted by how pale the stranger's skin was, almost identical in shade to his. In fact he was sure than if it hadn't been for the man's darker shade of brown curls, they would have looked even more eerily similar _._

Belatedly he remembered the man had told him something and he hurried to reply.

"Thank you." Then with an afterthought he added. "I'm named after my father."

There was another long pause and then the man was standing up and looking down at him with such a strange expression.

"Yes." He said. "You are."

* * *

Molly watched them coming back towards the house, her eyes taking in their pale skin, their blue-green eyes and their shiny curls. One with chocolate brown and the other with her own lighter honey brown. She already knew that someday her son would be just as tall, with the same delicate cheekbones and elegant hands as his father.

Then William reached her, his eyes bright with amusement and barely suppressible glee.

"Mum, you won't believe it. His name is Sherlock too!"

Molly could see the tell tale signs of curiosity and fascination in her son's eyes, and beneath that she could see something else, something that made the tears in her eyes flow freely down her already damp cheeks. _Recognition._  This might have been the first time William saw him but a part of him  _knew_  who he was. He had always been so perceptive for his age.

"Mum can Sherlock stay for dinner?"

Molly turned her gaze from her son, her eyes locking with Sherlock's and speaking her next words directly to him.

"He can stay as long as he wants."

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated.


End file.
